Oh, I wouldn’t start that downfall during Marissa Meyer’s reign of error.

Remember when Yahoo hired a CEO who lied about having a CS degree?

https://money.cnn.com/2012/05/13/technology/yahoo-ceo-out/in...

Ha, good point. Seems like ex-CEO Scott Thompson is doing ok these days:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Thompson_(businessman)

His Yahoo departure is attributed to thyroid cancer: "In 2012, Thompson was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, which was said to be a reason for leaving Yahoo!."

And Marissa Mayer became extremely wealthy for her mishandling of Yahoo.

I don’t understand what Yahoo is supposed to be. Suddenly in 2015, they have the genius step of publishing an email UI on paar with Gmail, as they should have done about 10 years earlier. But unless you are using their email, what _is_ Yahoo? For me it is a weather widget and a news feed. Not counting Yahoo Finance because other comments say it’s shutting down. So what is the core business of Yahoo? A news corp that repeats Reuters, but without the TV front-end that CNN has, and without the journalists that the Washington Post has?

> I don’t understand what Yahoo is supposed to be.

The corporate equivalent of a terminal cancer patient.

What it was, is aptly described here: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2848

I can't answer that for today. But there was a time when they had a very active shopping site -- they were an earlier version of Amazon for 3rd-party merchants, Shopify or Etsy where anyone could open a "store". And Yahoo handled payments, as I recall, just like Amazon does now. I bought many things from there.

Where is that today? Gone, I guess. But it could have been an Amazon or Shopify.

They also had a lucrative ad business. Gone now, I think.

And bringing this full circle, I wonder if you may be referring to Viaweb?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viaweb

They were originally a do-everything Internet company like Google, but without the aura of smugness and infinite amount of ad money. (My friend who was a Yahoo Search sysadmin tells me they had nearly as good results as Google on much, much smaller amounts of hardware expenditure.)

At some point they tried to become a media company or something and did hire a lot of journalists, but they kept making the wrong moves and trying to acquire users by buying unprofitable websites like Tumblr and eventually ran out of money.

I don't know what they're trying to be, but outside of Yahoo Finance the only other thing I'm aware of people using Yahoo for these days is fantasy sports. One of the fantasy football leagues I do every year still uses Yahoo, and other friends that play fantasy seem to report similar. But I don't know what the numbers actually are because it's true Yahoo doesn't seem to lean into that role much.

How about a new venture? Like building an alternative to the Apple App Store and Google Play? Then going to Congress to complain about default installation on the devices (or any sort of installation at all).

They have the name recognition to pull off something like this.

They seem to be trying to be nothing at all, and getting closer with each passing year!

I don't really understand the argument here. How is sunsetting Answers related to mismanagement?

Seems like Answers, as cool and interesting and funny as it was, was probably not a major revenue driver or even loss leader anymore for Yahoo. Seems like it'd be an obvious candidate for being cut, as a deadweight project that siphons engineering time from initiatives that actually make money.

Sure, it's sad that it's going away. But Yahoo isn't a charity, it's a corporation, and "jettison projects that cost money and focus instead on projects that make money" seems like one of the most basic tenets of managing a business.

Like, I totally get the argument that when Yahoo or Google or whoever shuts down one of their services it's an annoyance for users. No doubt. But I don't understand how it's a sign of "mismanagement".

> How is sunsetting Answers related to mismanagement?

Considering that oath is an ad company and Answers is among the top results for many Google searches and most of the Answer traffic probably is read only this is weird.

Answers users give an intent what they are up to, which allows targeting ads based on that topic. Having mostly readily traffic means that infrastructure can be efficient ...

So yeah, manageqment didn't handle the position well.

Do ads care about targeting these days? I thought they were more interested in retargeting, where they know who you are and always show the most valuable thing on every site, ignoring what you're actually doing at the moment. This is bad for ad displayers because it means there's no point in collecting a higher value audience.

> How is sunsetting Answers related to mismanagement?

My post was a general statement and not directed at any singular Yahoo product.

I wouldn't put it all on her. Back in 2008, Yahoo refused a $44b acquisition offer from Microsoft.

A few years later they acquired LinkedIn for around that much, and that's definitely been more successful than most of what Yahoo offers now.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-idUSWNAS8942200...

Meyer didn't start it, but she did put distinctly more marketing and hype into her role than predecessors which shone a brighter spotlight on the already ensuing downfall. I'd be more inclined to pinpoint the start of it to sometime around Jerry Yang's departure and the revolving door of CEOs between him and Mayer when their tenure was more akin to flailing than building leadership.