Yahoo this morning announced that it's appointing PayPal President Scott Thompson as new CEO, effective January 9th. Interim CEO Tim Morse will return as CFO. Yahoo's looking to Thompson's record at eBay, where he doubled PayPal's userbase and grew the online payments service into one of eBay's biggest revenue sources.

Yahoo's moved through several CEOs over the past few years, with Jerry Yang replaced by Carol Bartz in early 2009, and Tim Morse taking over in September, 2011. In spite of the company's troubles and lagging product development, it's still an enormous brand with hundreds of millions of users spread across Yahoo Mail, Flickr, and its portals. The web's landscape has seen radical changes since Yahoo took off during the first dot-com wave — can Thompson leverage the brand and userbase to spark a revival in Santa Clara?