“Name another Internet giant that went through three years of decline and then started to grow again,”

This captures the difficulty of their situation. If she turns it around, she'll be one of the Valley's great CEOs.

"most recently, it languished under Carol Bartz and Scott Thompson as a dot-com relic known mostly for losing its top talent to competitors."

When top talent choose to join Yahoo instead of Google, Facebook and Twitter, that will be a sign that things have changed. This doesn't count acquihires.