Yahoo's new marketing push tells us to "Start Wearing Purple." A website created for the campaign features a video of various grungy-looking people, including Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, wearing purple and hollering. We'd show you the video, but it's not very different from a clip a tipster found of Yahoo cofounder David Filo and top exec Ash Patel dancing awkwardly to a Kelly Clarkson cover. The pair flail around like they're in some kind of bizarro-world Apple iPod commercial. That's the problem with Yahoo: It thinks it's an iPod — universally loved and carried around. But it's really a Mac — a fine product nevertheless rejected by many.Click to view Yahoo, triumphant over a host of other wannabe Web portals in the '90s, resurgent in the early part of this decade, has never really gotten used to not being No. 1. Apple, for all its arrogance, recognizes that the Mac is not the best-selling PC brand. Yahoo's marketing department should spend all its time explaining to Internet users why they should use Yahoo instead of its competitors. That's what Apple does with its "Mac vs. PC" ads. Each commercial humorously sticks to its talking points comparing the advantages of Macs over PCs. Apple does this because it remains far behind in the PC market and needs to convince customers to switch from more popular products. That's what Yahoo needs to do in search. But instead of saying why users should, it markets itself the way Apple markets the iPod — as a ubiquitous aspect of a certain way of life. Apple can do this because it already dominates a market full of similar digital music players. A better product helped sell the iPod to the masses. But an advertising campaign which keeps people associating themselves with the brand reinforces Apple's dominance. Yahoo doesn't have that luxury. It still dominates, but in tiny niches. It needs to say why Yahoo News is better than Google News and the New York Times. It needs to say why Yahoo Fantasy Sports games are the most popular on the Web. It needs to say why anyone who owns a digital camera should upload their pictures to Flickr, not Facebook. But instead, Yahoo spends all it's time trying too hard to convince users how wonderfully wacky it is. What's tragic about that is that the brand Yahoo is trying to create isn't particularly attractive. Look, it screams, we're so desperate to be seen as kooky kids, we're willing to hit our top executives in the face with rubber balls! Perhaps the real target of the campaign is Yahoo's own employees. Morale is in the dumpster at its Sunnyvale headquarters. "Bleeding purple," Yahoo's longtime catchphrase for displaying loyalty to the company, has come to refer to the endless exodus of employees. Wearing purple may boost the mood of longtime Yahoos. But it will hurt recruiting for those outside the cult. What adult wants to work at the company which still hasn't figured out what it wants to be when it grows up?

Yahoo's shares rebounded Thursday from five-year lows. The unveiling of a big redesign, the first in two years, revved up traders. But they may not have been as bullish if they knew, as Yahoo insiders do, that the homepage revamp, originally due in October, is months behind schedule and much less ambitious than hoped. Far from revealing a newly energized Yahoo, the delays reveal that the Internet company still suffers from the same problems that have hobbled it for years.Mismanagement and bureaucratic balkanization continue to rule Yahoo. The team developing the new homepage, both the front-end design and the back-end architecture, worked in a vacuum as executives above them kept getting reorged. The mockup of the new design looks great (and yes, the logo will be purple). But the amount of incredibly profitable front-page advertising space was significantly reduced. That's because nobody bothered to discuss the project with ad sales until months of work were done. Even then engineers had to step in to fix problem. Famously unproductive products chief Ash Patel touted third-party widgets, such as a tool that let Yahoo users view upcoming DVDs in their Netflix queue. But Netflix was a consolation prize. Yahoo's product managers have plans to include updates from Facebook and messages from Google's email service, Gmail, on users' homepages. But Facebook and Google have refused to give Yahoo access. What was supposed to be a big news event ended up as a tease for reporters to placate shareholders and stir up developer interest for an event this weekend. Instead of a seismic announcement to undo the publicity damage from the botched Microsoft deal, Yahoo will have to settle for the slightest of tremors. It's not the shakeup Yahoo needs.

"Nicki is editing one helluva an inspiring video," read Yahoo corporate-blog editor Nicki Dugan's Facebook status last night. Sounds like it was a hit. A tipster writes: "You are gonna love the Ash and Venkat lovefest video just shown at Y's all hands to the tune of the Friend's theme song! It's like Bollywood meets typical vacuous Yahoo! propaganda, yet still makes you laugh. Enjoy!" The "Ash" in question is Ash Patel, the famously do-nothing executive recently put in charge of Yahoo's products group. I'm just impressed that Dugan got Patel off his duff twice in a row.

Do we still have to pity Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang? Or is it, at long last, acceptable to simply hold him in contempt? With Microsoft backing corporate raider Carl Icahn's replacement board of directors, and major investor Gordon Crawford also lining up to support Icahn, Yang's time at the company is coming to an end, and he seems to know it. Yet he's trying to stay on anyway. Like any leader facing certain failure, Yang has begun to indulge in pure make-believe. Here's a short list of Yang's Yahoo fantasies.

Yahoos like Ash Patel personally. They just think he's an inept manager, uninspiring leader and kind of lazy. But good fortune and Jerry Yang's disregard for his own reputation among the troops have conspired to make Patel the head of a new Global Products group and he's determined to take the opportunity both prove his doubters wrong and save Yahoo. Just as soon as he gets back from his vacation, which we hear he's beginning today. (Photo by Sandip Bhattacharya)

When we noted (only reporters' reporter Kara Swisher reported it) that Yahoo president Sue Decker's last reorganization included promoting longtime Yahoo Ash Patel to head of a new Global Products group, probably the nicest comment came from therealsunnyvalequeen, who wrote: "Ash is a good technical leader, but cannot possibly do what they have now asked of him." BoomTown's Kara Swisher reports several Yahoo executives echo the sentiment. Apparently tone-deaf Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang does not.

Yahoo CEO-in waiting Sue Decker continues to push the company through yet another reorganization. An her minions aren't happy about it. One told Kara Swisher: “I am not sure right now, with all this drama and all this tension from Microsoft’s failed takeover and the rest of it, why we have to do this. This feels crazy.” We figure the best way to do this is rip the band-aid off and move on. So below, who's in, who's up and who's out in quick and dirty bullet points.

No tech executive draws more bile and disdain than Ash Patel. So why is Yahoo president Sue Decker promoting him to fill the place of several departing executives? Let me keep it short and sweet: Decker is a charmless Wall Street type who's bad at managing people. Patel's main skill, one that has kept him at place in Yahoo for 12 years, is managing up. His second talent: making excuses for the fact that he's rarely seen on campus before 10:30. No one who's serious at Yahoo has any respect for Patel, and no one who's sensible cares to report to him. Decker's plan is succeeding in one regard: All the departures Patel's promotion is sparking will surely reduce costs.

Everyone's piling on Jerry Yang, saying Yahoo's founder-CEO needs to go. Why? The weak stock that provoked Microsoft's unsolicited bid may have been the result of his absentee ownership over the years. But Yahoo's deeper problem is the rot in its technical prowess. And that has everything to do with the quieter cofounder, David Filo. Filo has stayed behind the scenes, but wields considerable power over Yahoo's infrastructure. Requests for more hardware go through him, for example. When Yahoo executive Jeff Weiner joked in an internal all-hands movie about not going through IT because it was "too much paperwork," the audience surely laughed because they knew exactly what he meant.

This morning, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made the usual polite noises about "integrating" Yahoo's management into Microsoft. The reality? Come on. They're all fired, except for the geeks. If Microsoft had any respect for current management, they would have negotiated a friendly deal instead of launching a takeover. Most of the executive suite will be gone, I bet, within six months if the takeover succeeds. Here are the details on who's in and who's out, starting at the top.

Has Ari Balogh arrived too late? That's the key question for Yahoo's new CTO, freshly hired away from VeriSign. Balogh will take charge of all of Yahoo's engineering functions, essentially leaderless since former CTO Farzad Nazem quit last May. The new blood could bring some much-needed shakeups. Presumably, current tech executives Usama Fayyad, Qi Lu, and Ash Patel will report to him. One wonders how long that situation will last. Patel, in particular, has been checked out for some time, according to sources at Yahoo, and Balogh's hire may be his cue to leave. Balogh will have another challenge: VeriSign's reputation.

As part of Jerry Yang's promised 100-day turnaround of the company, Yahoo recruited some of its best and brightest, in small teams of 4 to 6 people, to cook up bold new tactics to compete with Facebook, Google, and the rest. Yahoo executive Ash Patel oversaw the initiative, which was disruptive to the company's day-to-day work, says a tipster brought into one of the secret skunkworks. Those drafted poured weeks into the effort, he says, with the hope that their ideas might actually get built. No such luck. Yang reviewed the projects — and then promptly sent them into Yahoo's managerial swamps for execution. Which, of course, means nothing's getting done, as usual. What will change that, I wonder?