With Bartz Out, Yahoo's Future Is Unclear and, While Unlikely, a Sale is Possible

Yahoo has been struggling for years to turn things around and start seeing some solid growth and revenue once again. Previous CEOs tried, and failed, to turn the tides and now the latest, Carol Bartz, has been ousted after the board got tired of waiting for things to start looking up.

Bartz was brought in to revitalize and restructure Yahoo in the hopes of better performance from the company. While she did manage to streamline Yahoo a bit, the picture is still bad overall.

Now that Bartz failed and Yahoo still isn't seeing any growth, what are the company's options? Frankly, it's not sure either and the board is not dismissing any path, even more extreme ones.

The Yahoo board is expected to hire consultancy companies to determine what are its options going forward, but is said to have not done so already.

While it is open to all suggestions, there is no indication that Yahoo is analyzing the option of being put up for sale. Instead, it's looking to see if there are acquisitions or partnerships that would make sense for the company.

Another possible path going forward would be to sell off parts of the company. Currently, Yahoo's stock market worth is made up almost entirely of the value of its two big Asian investments, Alibaba and Yahoo Japan.

Yahoo owns big stakes in the Chinese web giant and in the Japanese portal. Both of those companies are doing very well financially.

Yahoo's stakes could be worth quite a lot of money, but there is no indication that the company plans to sell them, they're one of its biggest assets at this point and Yahoo doesn't really need the cash. But with the board and investors fed up with the lack of growth, perhaps they would consider selling the Asian stakes.

Finally, the most extreme option would be to sell Yahoo altogether. There have been some interested in buying the company, or parts of it. Rumors of AOL thinking about taking over Yahoo have surfaced from time to time. AOL is much smaller than Yahoo so any deal would have to be after the Asian stakes have been sold off.