I used to be in academia and I'm running a startup now. I'm absolutely certain that generating computer science research papers, even brilliant ones, is a heck of a lot easier than the absolutely insane focus required to ship breakthrough products.
From what I can tell, Yahoo now has a phenomenal environment for people with this level of focus. As for the castles-in-the-sky research people leaving Yahoo, it's probably better off for both the research people and Yahoo. It's got a new business to build -- funding research papers that go nowhere does nothing to advance that goal.
For those not initiated, OpenDoc was a multimedia document format developed by Apple before Steve Jobs came back to Apple, which was when he violently killed OpenDoc.
That's funny.
Edit: Here they are: http://www.research.yahoo.com/publication
If you look at yahoo latest earnings most of their money is coming from the Alibaba investment and their hedging of the yen, which seems to have been used to help pay for tumblr. Yahoo cannot buy their way out of this, just like steve jobs could not buy Apples way out during the 90's instead they had to use their human capital and innovate their way out. I don;t know who should have led yahoo but i do know that their biggest strength was their human capital which is being wasted and marginalized. It's even more evident when your competitors are implementing the research successfully and going further.