A relationship, Woody Allen argued, is like a shark: it must constantly move forward or it dies. What Yahoo has on its hands in Asia is a pair of dead sharks. In Japan, it has 35 per cent of Yahoo Japan, a listed joint venture with mobile phone company Softbank (37 per cent), where chairman Masayoshi Son (also president of Softbank) has been openly critical of the Californians’ strategy. In China, Yahoo has 40 per cent of Alibaba, the unlisted parent of a cluster of e-commerce businesses, where chairman Jack Ma has made concerted attempts to get it off the register. Whispers of some kind of exit for Yahoo in Japan caused the joint venture’s shares to surge on Wednesday.

In both relationships, Yahoo has outlived its usefulness. The trouble is that Yahoo cannot tackle one relationship without tackling the other. Softbank owns 30 per cent of Alibaba; Mr Ma sits on Softbank’s board. A full or partial sale of either position must be negotiated multilaterally. That’s tough enough when relations are civil. Here, the frictions are obvious. Both Mr Ma and Mr Son speak much more highly of Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s former chief executive, than of the incumbent Carol Bartz. Last year Yahoo Japan began using Google’s search engine, rather than Microsoft’s, which is used by Yahoo.

The question for Yahoo’s board is how much of this it can take. The status quo cannot continue: as Mr Ma runs China and Mr Son runs Japan, Ms Bartz is a chief executive with very limited leverage over assets that account for perhaps four-fifths of the group’s market capitalisation. The only certainty is that a lack of resolution is hurting Yahoo, which has lagged behind the S&P tech sector by a fifth since the beginning of last year. Dead sharks make great art, but lousy commerce.