> Mayer being a bad hire / performing poorly AND Yahoo being at a point of no return can certainly co-exist with one another.

Sure they can, but if Yahoo really was at the point of no return, then it ultimately being sold for parts can't (in isolation) be used as an indicator of her performance. I remember when she took the helm thinking that it would take an unbelievable feat from anybody to turn that company around.

She's similar to John Chen (Blackberry) in the task they seemed to be given. Both brought on to captain a ship that was taking on water.

I think it is crazy to say Yahoo was a sinking ship unable to be made buoyant. The number one thing they have going for them is Name/Legacy Habit. People still yahoo just because they still do. You could have let 90% off the company go, destroyed all the technology (but not the data, always import it into the new systems to not alienate long term customers) and started over.

Instead she decided she wanted to be a newspaper/tv channel, instead of a tech company. Look at the trajectory Medium.com has taken, or wordpress, even atavist. Vox Chorus and Gawker Kinja. Instead yahoo chose to continue to compete with about.com as a crappy content mill / 2nd layer newswire.

Yahoo Fantasy and Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Messenger and Flickr were all basically left to die. There was really no reason NOT to clone FBMessenger/Line/WeChat/QQ/WhatsApp. They should have been adding features to Finance and Messenger every week.

I know people who worked like just a few levels under here and they seemed to think some of your criticism of Mayer is true. However, she at least sold the company and will learn from this and will be a better CEO for the next company she joins.