Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer is very proud of her new logo up there—she made it herself over the weekend! And somehow made the company look more dated than ever. It also represents a Yahoo! that has little idea what it's doing, if it's doing anything at all.

The avuncular net firm might be the most superficial internet company of our time: it's in the business of looking like it's doing business. What has it accomplished under Mayer's reign beyond purchasing middling startups, and Tumblr? Right. Yahoo! turned the logo refresh into a month-long event, a purple smoke and mirrors affair to mask inactivity with marketing. But at least shareholders can point to a logo redesign that somehow makes the company look even more dated than ever—and Mayer has a painfully lame explanation to go along with it:

On a personal level, I love brands, logos, color, design, and, most of all, Adobe Illustrator. I think it’s one of the most incredible software packages ever made. I’m not a pro, but I know enough to be dangerous :)

Dangerous! Mayer claims she "rolled up [her] sleeves" for the design process, but then notes that it was overhauled by committee—and, depressingly, an employee poll:

Prior to the weekend, we had also polled our employees on the changes they wanted to see. Interestingly, 87% of our employees wanted some type of change in the logo (either iterative or radical).

Mayer can't even OK a logo—one that looks like it was made by a high school kid in Microsoft word, messing around with all the 3D text settings—without help. If you're going to run a company of appearances, you at least need to look good.

They still will. But not for the same reasons.