The first question I have for Yahoo’s board of directors is “what took you so long?” Was it founder’s syndrome that kept Jerry Yang from stepping down or a board too timid to do the obvious?

 The stock price alone provides compelling evidence that change was overdue. Yahoo’s stock has fallen by two-thirds since Microsoft offered to buy the company for $33 a share back in the spring and Jerry said “No!” It has rebounded 12 percent since Monday’s announcement of Mr. Yang’s intent to step down.

Maybe now Yahoo will finally figure out what Yahoo is. While archrival Google always maintained its focus on being a search company and making money through search advertising, Yahoo was all over the map. It has lurched from one identity to the next. For six years Yahoo was led by Terry Semel, a Hollywood executive who seemed bent on turning the company into a media conglomerate. He brought in former ABC TV chief Lloyd Braun, who developed Lost and Desperate Housewives, and they made plans for original TV shows for the Internet. Then suddenly, in 2006, just as video became a force on the Internet, the company denied having any media ambitions. Mr. Semel left in 2007, and Mr. Yang came back as CEO.

Google has become so dominant that it is easy to forget that Yahoo was the search pioneer, going public even before Google was founded. Yahoo! started as personal project by two Stanford University graduate engineering students, Mr. Yang and David Filo, who set up a search engine in a campus trailer in 1994 to track their favorite web sites. By the time the site registered 1 million hits in a single day, the two men realized they had a business. They raised $2 million in venture funding from Sequoia in 1995. In April of 1996 Yahoo!, with just 49 employees, went public at $13 a share; the stock soared to $43 before settling $33. At the height of the dot-com boom, Yahoo shares reached $118. At that point, Yahoo was the No.1 Internet brand. The day after Mr. Yang resigned, the shares traded at just under $12 and a market cap of $16 billion, down 20 billion since Mr. Yang turned down Microsoft’s offer.

Then two years after Yahoo’s IPO, two other Stanford students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page started Google. It took six years to go public, a spectacular public offering that raised $1.67 billion in 2004 and gave the company a market cap of $23 billion. Today, Google is worth $94 billion. Yahoo has lost $16 billion of its value. Google has steadily gained in revenue and in reputation. The company became one of the most desirable places to work. It came out with cool products: Google Mail, Google Earth, and a suite of desktop applications that work over the Internet (“cloud computing”) that seemed aimed at breaking Microsoft’s hold on consumers.

Yahoo lost its cachet. It no longer seemed on the cutting edge. The name didn’t come up in Silicon Valley the best and brightest no longer beat a path to its door. Yahoo remained one of the most popular destinations on the Web, but its search engine fell to No. 2.

Ultimately, Google may have indirectly caused Mr. Yang’s exit. As Yahoo struggled to hold off Microsoft, Mr. Yang discussed a deal to let Google run ads on Yahoo’s site. Microsoft abandoned its quest.  But the planned alliance with Google, which controls 60 percent of Internet searches, raised antitrust issues, and last week, Google called the whole thing off.  Mr. Yang was left holding an empty bag and a bunch of devalued shares. That’s finally when the board bit the bullet.