Paul Graham's What happened to Yahoo[0] is probably just as relevent now as when he wrote it in 2010.
> One of the weirdest things about Yahoo when I went to work there was the way they insisted on calling themselves a "media company.
That was a bad decision then, but at the time content and media were newer on the internet and had value. They don't anymore. Yahoo finance and fantasy sports are nice things to provide, but they aren't a google killer for sure.
Yahoo's core business is media not technology. If the NYT and Wall Street Journal are any indication, media is a bad business to be in.
Wish I could find the article I read this in (googling around has failed me), but I believe around 2010 they also started bringing in execs and business people from Hollywood/MSM and there was a big clash of cultures.
The Wired article looks particularly painful. If memory serves, Yahoo first declined to buy proto-Google for one million. Then again in 2002 for 5 billion.
Pretty much everyone with a million dollars laying around declined to spend it on acquiring Google back then, it's not like Yahoo was the only company they approached.
> One of the weirdest things about Yahoo when I went to work there was the way they insisted on calling themselves a "media company.
That was a bad decision then, but at the time content and media were newer on the internet and had value. They don't anymore. Yahoo finance and fantasy sports are nice things to provide, but they aren't a google killer for sure.
Yahoo's core business is media not technology. If the NYT and Wall Street Journal are any indication, media is a bad business to be in.
[0]http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html