You won't have to wait until July to play musical chairs with the members of Yahoo!'s
Ed Kozel, who has been a board member since 2000, is stepping down.
Kozel, who cut his teeth at Cisco
Instead of replacing Kozel, Yahoo! will simply shrink the size of the board from 10 members to nine.
The move won't stop Carl Icahn's proxy battle to replace the entire board. Icahn wants Yahoo! to reopen talks with Microsoft, even if Microsoft has made it clear that it does not intend to buy Yahoo!, for now.
"I could be wrong, but Kozel seems like the real sleeper on the board, with a background in technology as well as finance," Marketwatch's John Dvorak wrote last week in handicapping Yahoo!'s boardroom. "He's probably underappreciated."
Score one for Dvorak. He called the company's board "mediocre" before Kozel bolted, so one can only imagine how the board is holding up with one of its few tech minds leaving.
Yahoo!'s annual shareholder meeting will still take place this summer, only now it will probably happen in late July.
It's going to be a good one, at least in terms of fireworks. Both Google
Now one has to wonder how many board members will still be around to face the music this summer.
And then there were nine.