Yahoo Succumbs
Yahoo!, the Internet's darling child that could do no wrong, steadfastly bucking recent trends which have caused the demise of many other dot-com players, has finally fallen to earth.

The company's gravity-defying ability to repeatedly meet market expectations in the face of declining advertising and other revenues was curtailed today when it announced that CEO Tim Koogle is stepping down and that its first-quarter earnings for 2001 will fall significantly short of expectations.

Koogle will remain on Yahoo's payroll however even once a replacement CEO is found -- he will be chairman of the company's board.

The company attributes its poor performance to the same declining ad revenues that have hit so many other online operations and the markets responded to this new uncertainty by driving Yahoo's stock price down by six percent.

It will not be clear until trading starts tomorrow whether Yahoo's reality check will reverse the gains made by tech stocks on the Nasdaq in recent days.