Products aren’t escaping the cuts - in the most embarrassing example, it offloaded France-based shopping comparison site Kelkoo to a little-known UK private equity player for under €100 million, four years after buying it for about €475 million. Yahoo does have some interesting projects on the books, like operating the Eurosport news site as a JV, and it powers UK and Australian display ads for Bebo, for the time being at least. But if staff thought the cuts delivered by Coppel were the end of it, they should get prepared for yet another review by the new chief exec.

—How to stop Google’s utter dominance? While Yahoo enjoys only a 16 percent share of the US search market against Google’s 64 percent (Nielsen Online, Nov 08), it can only hope for that in the UK, where it commands just six percent of searches against Google’s 81 percent. That’s twice as good as MSN there, but Yahoo is even farther behind in France and Germany, where it plays a distant fourth to Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) and even T-Mobile. Adding Microsoft’s search assets to Yahoo’s paltry share - should a tie-up ever happen - would still make for only a minimal challenge to Mountain View. Such grand strategic alliances won’t turn around this performance - Yahoo must either roll up its sleeves and develop its way back in to search contention, or get out of the market by outsourcing its service.

—Will she bring innovation back to Yahoo?: Will Bartz’s techy track record mean Yahoo rediscovering its innovation mojo? It opened a new search R&D centre in Grenoble, France, to much fanfare last autumn - but this was really just building on Kelkoo, which had operated from there for a number of years. Yahoo Europe’s best gift to the world has been Yahoo Answers, which is due to be rolled out internationally from the Grenoble site, where engineers are also working on semantic search technology.