Well, well, well. After six years — and the last couple of those facing mounting criticism of his efforts in the corner suite — Hollywood transplant Terry Semel is out as chief executive officer of Yahoo. To add insult to injury (although he remains non-executive chairman, which means he’s hardly hitting the bread lines) the share price of the Internet portal jumped by more than five per cent in after-hours trading after the company announced the news. Yahoo is going back to the future for a CEO: co-founder and Chief Yahoo Jerry Yang becomes the new chief executive. Yang has a blog post about it here. He says that Semel:

“Refocused the company on key strategic priorities, and in so doing, helped Yahoo! increase our revenues nearly nine-fold from $717 million in 2001 to $6.4 billion in 2006; boost our operating income from a loss in 2001 to nearly $1 billion last year; and create more than $30 billion in shareholder value during his tenure.

He helped grow our audience from 170 million to more than 500 million users globally, and he oversaw the expansion of our base of talented employees from 3,500 to nearly 12,000.”

This has to make Eric Jackson feel pretty good — he put together a Web-based protest group (mentioned by the Times UK and Wired, among other places) that got a significant amount of support from disgruntled shareholders, and took its criticisms to the Yahoo shareholders meeting. My friend Paul Kedrosky, who has been predicting this move would come, live-blogged the conference call.

I guess the pressure is on Jerry Yang now — although I’m sure his $2.2-billion net worth should be a comfort either way. Valleywag has a comprehensive “corporate obituary” on Semel and his reign here — and also points out that Jerry Yang is no Steve Jobs. Ouch. Painful but true, I suspect. Mike Arrington has a different take on the news at TechCrunch: why so sudden? Yahoo could have announced his retirement, etc. and taken its time. Instead, he is just gone and Yahoo turns to an old standby. That is a little odd.

Maybe if I were working at Yahoo, I would be all fired up by Terry Semel’s carefully calculated “Hey, let’s get all fired up” speech, which Jonathan Strauss has helpfully transcribed on his Yahoo blog. Terry says the media are “full of shit,” and that they all dissed Yahoo five years ago and now they’re dissing it again, but it won’t stop the company, etc., etc. All his speech needed was the soundtrack from the climactic scene in Saving Private Ryan.

It could be just me, but I don’t think Terry Semel makes a very good General Patton, or whoever he was trying to channel in his little tirade. He looks like the kind of guy who wouldn’t say shit if his mouth was full of it — or maybe if someone on the corporate messaging team told him it would make him look like a take-charge kind of guy. Nice try, Terry. I hope for your sake it makes your employees forget how far down all their stock options have sunk.

And Terry “The Tiger” doesn’t do much better in the video clip from CNBC that Mike Arrington has posted over at TechCrunch, in which he tries to deny the rumours of layoffs while giving himself a loophole big enough to drive a tractor-trailer through. As several commenters have pointed out, all Semel denies is that there will be 15 to 20 per cent layoffs, not that there will be any layoffs at all. As for the five years ago comparison, Dave “500 hats” McClure notes on Om’s blog post that

The main difference between then & now is that everybody got hit hard in 2000 / 2001, and everyone had to recover at the same time with equivalent challenges.

This time around, lots of companies appear to be kicking ass — most notably Google — but Yahoo is struggling to keep their stock price afloat while they squander #1 position in users & page views.

No one gets blamed for drowning in a typhoon. but if you can’t swim when the sun is shining that’s a different story.

If things don’t start turning around at Yahoo, not only will they have to take away the exclamation mark, but I have a feeling Terry might be saying shit a few more times — and he might even mean it.