You can call it a fiefdom, or you can call it decentralized decision making. It is definitely a large part of why the CEO of Yahoo, whoever it is today, is largely unable to make a huge difference. If I were CEO [1], I would actually embrace this, and return individual responsibility to the verticals. I'd also switch back the logo :)

Anyway, in most of these verticals, Yahoo was competing with companies that were dedicated to the space, and had way more people working on it. Yahoo! Travel was in the neighborhood of 25 people, and TripAdvisor was closer to 1,000. We were able to compete because we could leverage yahoo platforms, and then do what we needed to do within our space.