Will Yahoo's latest chief executive be its last?

So adieu Scott Thompson. He came to Yahoo with a reputation as one of Silicon Valley's brightest stars and left just a few months later, broken on the wheel of the tech industry's most dysfunctional company.

On the face of it, Thompson's brief tenure could be dismissed as an unfortunate episode – an executive with a fine pedigree brought down by a fateful indiscretion.

But the continued upheaval at the ailing internet giant paints a more lamentable picture: Yahoo has burnt through a series of chief executives with little sign that any of them can divert the firm from its seemingly inexorable death spiral.

For Thompson himself, the dye was cast as he bumbled the response to revelations that his degree from Stonehill College did not include qualifications in computer science as had been claimed.

The lack of computer science qualifications did not mean Thompson couldn't have succeeded at Yahoo – after all, Jerry Yang had all the computer science chops anyone could wish for. Little good it did him during his time at Yahoo's helm.

What did for Thompson was his response and the dawning realisation that his credibility was shot.

But what next for Yahoo? Thompson shot out of the blocks during his brief stint by announcing savage job cuts, attempting to streamline its flaccid operations and injecting some vigour into a firm that had become the poster child of technology dinosaurs that stare down the threat of extinction having failed to adapt to changing environments.

Thompson's vision was to do “away with everything that does not contribute to [Yahoo's] core business of profit-driving ads and e-commerce,” he told financial analysts earlier in the year.

In the short term, Yahoo's fate rests with Ross Levinsohn, who has been appointed as interim-chief executive.

It's not an appointment that has been celebrated in all quarters.

“Levinsohn has the wonderful pedigree of ‘masterminding’ News Corp’s pretty disastrous acquisition of MySpace in 2005,” said Richard Holway of analysts TechMarkView. “Some might say an even worse CV than Thompson's.”

Whether Levinsohn gets the gig full-time, or whether some other candidate is parachuted in, they will face one existential conundrum that cuts to the heart of Yahoo's troubles: What can it possibly do to revive its fortunes?

One strategy put forward by some financial analysts is to break up the firm. They think the best way to deliver value to shareholders will be by selling off the company silver.