Yahoo's stock may be tanking, employees abandoning ship, Carl Icahn divesting his shareholdings, and the company relying on once-hated rival Google to better profit from the site's traffic, but someone on the Sunnyvale campus has been working hard on a new logo! It's got the same jauntily jagged baseline, but dispatches with serifs for rounded linecaps. And, like much of the company's internal branding, it's finally purple. The story goes that co-founders David Filo and Jerry Yang painted the walls of the company's original office a cheery purple and yellow because it was the cheapest paint at the store. The paintjob also served to distract early employees from the fact that the roof in the office leaked. In other words, CEO Yang has a long history of slapping a cheap coat of paint over severe structural issues in the hopes of boosting morale.

Click to viewBenchmark-backed Glassdoor.com popped out of stealth mode as a site that lets users find out what employees think of their employers. As a part of the ratings, company CEO's get a grade. Some, such as Cisco's John T. Chambers and Apple's Steve Jobs fared very well — coming away with 93 percent and 95 percent approval ratings. Others, including Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, did not. The ten worst-rated CEO's and what employees told Glassdoor they think about them, below.

If Jeff Weiner, head of Yahoo's search, community, and media properties, leaves the company, who's left to run things? An outside hire seems unlikely, Michael Arrington points out, given Carl Icahn's fight with the Yahoo board. That leaves a battlefield promotion for one of Weiner's direct reports, shown here from left to right: Brad Garlinghouse, Scott Moore, Vish Makhijani, and Tapan Bhat. Here's our handicapping of this horserace:

What's wrong with Yahoo? Contentinople editor Scott Raynovich says that unlike Google, Apple and Microsoft, Yahoo doesn't have a succinct product-marketing strategy. He'd like to help them fix that. Unfortunately, at 1,700 words, Raynovich's piece isn't very succinct either. We're here to help, with a version Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang will have time to read before he gets another letter from Carl Icahn.

One reason Carl Icahn wants to replace the Yahoo board is so that he can rescind the change-in-control severance package Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang put into place after Microsoft made its offer to acquire the company in February. Yahoo says that if Icahn's slate were to take over the company, that would itself be a "change in control" and would trigger the severance provisions. Given this latest obstacle, Henry Blodget wonders when Icahn will pack up and go home.

Enough with the letters. It's time to vote. On Monday, Yahoo mailed out ballots for its upcoming board election, for which corporate raider Carl Icahn has proposed an alternative slate — one that will do his bidding and attempt to resuscitate merger talks with Microsoft. Yahoo also said it plans to spend $12 million campaigning for its board. Anyone who has owned Yahoo shares since before June 3 is eligible to vote online, via toll-free number or by snail mail. Yahoo will announce the results on August 1 at its annual shareholder meeting. By why wait till then? Review the pros and cons for each side and then vote your Valleywag proxy below.

Corporate raider Carl Icahn laid out a five step plan for Yahoo in a letter to Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock today. In brief, Icahn wants to replace Yahoo's poison pill severance package, usher CEO Jerry Yang back into his role as "Chief Yahoo," tell Microsoft that it can have any of Yahoo unless it owns all of it, sell Yahoo, or failing that outsource search to Google. Find the plan in Icahn's own words, below.

Details of Yahoo's poison-pill employee severance package, designed to deter a Microsoft aquisition, were revealed with the release of documents from the shareholder lawsuit pending in Delaware courts. Yahoo estimated the cost of post-acquisition layoffs as up to $2.1 billion; raider Carl Icahn, who's trying to force a sale to Microsoft, put the figure at $2.5 billion under the plan, according to the Wall Street Journal. Remarked Icahn, who thinks the details revealed will help him in his question to unseat Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang:

The complaint in a shareholder lawsuit against Yahoo unsealed yesterday reads like a whodunit. But my favorite part of the mystery are notes from the call Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang on January 31, the night before Ballmer took Microsoft's merger bid public. At one point, Yang pleads: "You don't lose anything by waiting a week." Ballmer saw right through Yang's delay tactics, saying there was no point in waiting if Yang didn't want to sell the company. See the exchange and the rest of the suit filing embedded below.

A judge has unsealed documents in a shareholder lawsuit against Yahoo, the Wall Street Journal reports, and the allegations, now posted online, are explosive. Chiefly, that Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo at $40 a share in January 2007. Then-CEO Terry Semel turned Microsoft down, seeking to strike a commercial partnership instead. Slow progress in negotiating that deal made Microsoft executives impatient, leading to its unsolicited bid at $31 a share. While the plaintiffs, two Michigan pension funds, are presenting that history, it actually explains much about Yahoo's resistance to Microsoft's recent advances.

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer played golf over the weekend, but neither were able to put the ball in the cup, so to speak. The way Yang put it in his answers to Walt Mossberg's questions at the D6 conference yesterday, a merger between the companies now seems as unlikely as it did the day Ballmer first walked away from negotiating table. "Microsoft is no longer interested in buying the company," Yang said. This news will not please Yahoo shareholders Carl Icahn and his allies, who control at least 29 percent of the company, favor a merger, and have started a proxy fight for control of the company's board. In the above clip, watch how Yang intends to deliver the bad news and fight for his job.

CARLSBAD, CA — For most of their D conference interviews, Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg trade off interview duties. But why was Mossberg the one to do the D6 interview with Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and president Sue Decker? Swisher frequently covers Yahoo in her AllThingsD.com blog; I can't think of the last time Mossberg has typed the letters "y-a-h-o-o" in his gadget reviews. Here's my theory: Decker and Yang agreed to speak at D6, but only if Mossberg was the interviewer, not Swisher. Then Swisher tweaked them by asking a question — not on stage, but on video. If so, serves Yang and Decker right for not nailing down all the conditions. Think they'll be having words with Yahoo flack Jill Nash afterwards? (Photo by Asa Mathat/AllThingsD.com)

Why didn't Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer follow through on his threat to take his $33 per share offer for Yahoo to its shareholders? Because Microsoft chairman Bill Gates tapped the brakes, reports Kara Swisher. "Numerous sources" say Gates didn't want a Yahoo merger as a way to solve Microsoft's online problems, but figured as CEO of the company, Ballmer should have free rein.

Can 27-year-old 4Info founder Zaw Thet's mobile ads keep Yahoo independent and save Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang's job? No. But 4Info can help Yahoo make money texting users with updates from Yahoo news, horoscopes, sports scores and weather forecasts. Today 4Info and Yahoo announced a trial partnership to split revenues earned by ads 4Info will serve against Yahoo content sent via SMS messages to users who have signed up for updates.

Like the rest of us, Yahoo's negotiators don't understand what Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer means when he says Microsoft wants to acquire just Yahoo's search business. Board members, fearing corporate raider Carl Icahn and his friends, would now prefer a full merger. Microsoft would be down with such a deal, except CEO Ballmer and company worry Yahoo cofounder Yang and Filo still won't accept a bid for less than $37 a share. We don't buy this excuse, if only because we've heard Yang and Filo don't have much say over negotiations anymore. Not after the high-fives.

When Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer met with Yahoo cofounders CEO Jerry Yang and David Filo on May 3, Yang and Filo refused to come down from their $37 per share price, according to Kara Swisher's new account of the meeting. Yang left thinking everything went well, and that he and ballmer were just starting to dicker over price — which would explain why he and Filo reportedly exchanged high-fives afterwards. The next day, Ballmer told the world Microsoft was withdrawing its offer.

Time Warner Cable will pay shareholders a $10.9 billion dividend as part of its spinoff from Time Warner, which will get $9.25 billion as its portion. With that cash in the bank, will Time Warner-Yahoo negotiations heat up? Last we heard, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes were negotiating a deal that would merge AOL and Yahoo and give Time Warner 20 percent control over the new company. According to Bewkes, the new cash could result in "disciplined acquisitions." Bewkes also acknowledged that AOL-Yahoo "discussions are going on." But here's the thing: as much as Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang might prefer merging with AOL rather than selling out as a whole or in splinters to Microsoft, it's not really up to him anymore, is it?

The fact that they're at the table — regardless of what they were telling themselves got them to the table — it's much more likely that they say "enough with the four foot high stack of paper outlining the details of the deal. Just merge."

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang is once again very eager to get a search-advertising deal with Google signed. Two sources tell the New York Post "executives are scrambling" to finalize the deal. Why such a rush? Because Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer identified the deal as the big reason Microsoft walked away from merger talks with Yahoo. Now that pro-merger Yahoo shareholders own at least 29 percent of the company — and are trying to replace the company board with directors who share that position — returning to the Google deal is the easiest way Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang will scuttle any renewed interest from Microsoft.

$30 billion hedge fund Paulson & Co. has released filings to show it owns 3.4 percent of Yahoo shares and intends to support Carl Icahn's bid to replace the company's board. Combined with Icahn's 4.3 percent share, Legg Mason fund manager Bill Miller's 5 percent share and Capital Research fund manager Gordon Crawford's 6 percent share, at least 18 percent of Yahoo's ownership now favors displacing the company's board with directors more amenable to a Microsoft merger. Capital Research funds beyond Crawford's control own another 11 percent of the company, raising that total to at least 29 percent. Shareholder activist Eric Jackson says investors owning another 3.2 million Yahoo shares favor a Microsoft merger as well. CEO Jerry Yang and chairman Roy Bostock can write all the letters they want. There's only one holdup: Getting Microsoft back to the table. (Photo by Simon Grossi)