WebProNews

A Sanford Bernstein analyst crunched Yahoo's business, and found himself throwing back up similar suggestions to those he made in 2007.

Fire a bunch of people, outsource the paid search business, and find a way to make Right Media a focal point.

If CEO Jerry Yang wants to cure his ongoing management headaches, Jeff Lindsay of Sanford Bernstein has the Excedrin for his ills. But it means admitting Yahoo isn't worth the sum of its parts.

Paid Content has the awful truth as Lindsay sees it. Yahoo's holdings have more value than the core business.

"Lindsay’s core concern is that the company is more interested in making incremental product improvements, as opposed to radical strategic shifts," Joseph Weisenthal said at Paid Content. But with search share falling and revenue and page views only trickling upwards mildly, Lindsay wants more aggressive action from Yang.

Page views may be a place where Yahoo can make an argument. Yahoo is the most heavily visited site in the world. Their engineers have been keen on implementing a lot of Ajax technology throughout Yahoo's properties.

With Ajax, content that would normally entail a page refresh, and thus another view for those counting them, instead updates within the page. When implemented properly, Ajax greatly enhances the user experience.

Using Ajax extensively cuts down on page views. That has to be taken into consideration when accounting for Yahoo's visitor activities. The Interactive Advertising Bureau has been wrestling with the issue of measuring Ajax effectively since 2006, but has yet to come up with a suitable metric.

As for the potential of Yahoo being sold, an undying rumor that came up yet again recently, it does not seem likely. Kara Swisher at All Things D suggested Microsoft would not be the only party interested in a Yahoo deal:

Plus, if Yahoo were in play, there would be a feeding frenzy for the still-strong Web property–including obvious interest from Comcast, AT&T and even Google (which would never ever happen because of antitrust issues).

More intriguing is the idea of Yahoo and eBay linking up, which makes a lot more sense, but it also is not in the works.

Yahoo has acknowledge chatting with Microsoft in the past, when Terry Semel still ran the show in Sunnyvale. To date, nothing has come of those talks, save what we expect were some impressive lunch tabs when they sat down to break bread and talk turkey.