Yahoo has a management problem, not a talent problem. There are plenty of talents at Yahoo capable of building and delivering great apps. Most of these acquisitions under Mayer were worthless and wouldn't fix Yahoo's internal issues.

It sounds like you have an insiders's perspective. From my very outsider's perspective it would appear that Yahoo did not manage to make much of the talent and opportunities it had or acquired.

Not really. It looks likes c-suit hubris and narcissism.

>Is talent really in that short supply that acqui-hiring makes sense?

If not, the alternative seems to be that Yahoo is buying up companies for no reason. My guess would be that they've been buying companies on the off chance that those companies had something that would turn Yahoo around in an afternoon.

Yahoo is a desperate company, in search of a money making scheme. It understandable. It can't be easy to look at the competitors and realise that you're on the path to becoming the next MySpace.

Yahoo do a few things well, their mail has at least earlier been good, Yahoo Finance is a great service, but there's no profit to be made from either.

Yahoo Finance could probably be monetized by shopping some sort of advanced feature to financial-software vendors. An Excel plugin would also be popular -- yes, it's nothing a VBA warrior couldn't code up in an afternoon, but a lot of people don't really want to do that. They could become Bloomberg for the masses, so to speak.

Pure email is not monetizable, but if they could tie in some unobtrusive freemium feature, there might be something in there. Remember that thread about commodity traders living on Yahoo IM? Surely some sort of IM/email mashup that could allow you to file and export messages could be popular.

I'm sure there more of value stored somewhere in the bully of Yahoo than just Finance, IM and email. I think there is money to be made like you suggest, but that's not the kind of company that Yahoo indicates that they want to be, sadly.

Yahoo will run it self into the ground trying to revive the glory days of Yahoo being the front page of Internet for millions of people. Management will not settle for a smaller service company, for a few niche markets.

Exactly, finance is the best thing they have and they already have the groundwork for creating a more general Bloomberg terminal.

They could have built an API to integrate broker/dealer systems and become a very nice plugin for equity trading. Or in reverse, they could offer you your existing brokerage right on the same page as the news.

Go social like InvestingNote. Track user models against the markets and host competitions.

Just guessing;

It might be really valuable to acquire a team of people, known to work / accomplish together. I think talent is not in short supply but god teams are hard to come by.

Also, the patents they acquire might be important in the long term too.

A team of people known to work & accomplish together had a common motivation when they worked for a startup, usually building a single product for a single market. The effects of this focus + motivation is huge. When a larger company like Yahoo acquires the focus + motivation is pulled from underneath them and quickly become quite average.