Likening APT (née AMP, née Project Apex, before its name was "awesomeized"), Yahoo's too-little-too-late ad platform, to the scotch-soaked, cigarette hazy halcyon days that Hamm's presence would evoke can only remind those potential ad buyers of how the business really isn't anymore. Like Yahoo's golden era, it, too, has passed, no matter how many smoke rings management attempts to wreath their current missteps in. As Don Draper said in his most famous pitch, clipped above: "Nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound."

Turns out online ad network operator Collective Media has already put an online advertising dashboard on the market, and yup, it's called AMP. Our tipster, who says he's a Yahoo shareholder, complains:

It shows just how desperate these guys are to get SOMETHING, ANYTHING out the door. I mean who doesn't do their due diligence before launching something that's going to "revolutionize the way media is bought"?

AMP is not a desktop app. To demonstrate its basic features AMP requires a hundred machines working together at a time, not counting the database server farms. How can they say the schedule wont slip when they have 20 percent less hardware and people they need to do the job. Working longer hours only goes so far.

The prospect of working on Apex, the promised "one ad platform to unite them all" which is mired in managerial turf wars, under Boyd's former mentor, rising tech star Qi Lu. Where's he going to? Mochi Media, an Accel Partners-backed startup which inserts online ads in Flash games.

The VPs are busy trying to show who has the biggest balls and nobody is running the show. Think of it as a fight for control between the YSM [Yahoo Search Marketing] team in Burbank, the old Goto people, and similar teams in the Bay Area. Winner gets the glory. Who cares if it is crap. Microsoft's offer is a blessing. Maybe they can provide some much needed management who knows how to run a business.

Project Apex, which may be the subject of a rumored Yahoo leadership meeting set for tomorrow, is not to be confused with Panama. Panama is the recently released but also painfully long-in-the-making supposed Yahoo savior, an ad-targeting system similar to Google's AdWords, used primarily for Yahoo's own sites. As a revamp of the current Yahoo Publisher Network, Project Apex might help boost Yahoo's ad revenues generated on partner sites, but it hardly seems like the boldest of moves.

We suspect that the uncreative and safe nature of this new direction stems from its hasty assembly. When asked about Yang's supposed 100-day plan, a friend confessed:

The punchline is that there is no plan. Yang was just saying it in a conversational, rally-the-troops sort of way, not realizing that the Street and the Valley were going to to mark that date in red ink and count the days.... The first rule of being CEO: don't set your company up to fail.