It’s not a big surprise that Marissa Mayer has failed to resurrect Yahoo. When the celebrated Google executive took over the web’s most iconic basket case in 2012, the odds were stacked against her. Turning around any company is difficult; turning around a tech company is nearly unheard-of. There’s just one example everyone can think of — Apple — but that effort took nearly a decade to show results, and anyway, if your requirement for success is to be like Steve Jobs, good luck to you.

So the fact that Yahoo’s board is now considering a sale of the company’s web business — after months of pressure from activist shareholders and a mass defection of executives that has left morale spiraling — is hardly a shock. The hearse has been heading down the 101 freeway to Yahoo’s sunny headquarters for years. Now it’s pulling into the parking lot, and Ms. Mayer just happens to be the chief executive who will greet it.

But what is genuinely surprising is how boring Ms. Mayer’s tenure has been.

Three years ago, when Ms. Mayer first took over, she sparked excitement about the future of a company that had, by then, put everyone to sleep. Finally, Yahoo was getting an executive who seemed to understand the web, who was infectiously excited about the possibilities of new technologies and who had a pretty good track record of ushering in new things.