It shouldn't take a rocket scientist to catch up with Google in online advertising. And yet, for years, that's who Yahoo's put on the job: Usama Fayyad, a veteran of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. We hear Fayyad is on his way out as Yahoo's "chief data officer," the man tasked with extracting value from the massive amount of data generated by Yahoo's users. Fayyad has long talked about how Yahoo can, in theory, extract insights from this data. "In theory" being Yahoo's eternal problem, and, if the rumor of his exit is true, the likeliest reason why the company is dispensing with him.

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