I worked at Yahoo from 2004-2011. This is my opinion only. Yahoo was doing pretty well at times during that period. Certainly, Google had better revenue numbers and better margins, but Yahoo was still making tons of money, just not as much. Leadership had a tough time explaining what Yahoo did; although, they had a clear goal in 2004 era onboarding --- be in the top 3 of all internet verticals either through owned and operated properties or cobranding --- basically be the one place you could do everything you want to do on the internet (except porn). Yahoo search tested comparable to Google search in user research if shown with Google headers, but not with Yahoo headers, and it was expensive to run. Yahoo search marketing (yahoo's version of adwords) was not friendly to small businesses, way less realtime and as a result had lower CPCs than Adwords. The Microsoft purchase would have been a disaster (but maybe I'd have gotten a free Xbox?) because culture issues would have ruined the whole thing. The Microsoft search + ads deal was bad for a few reasons: Microsoft didn't make their revenue numbers and negotiated down from the contract about a year in; Yahoo kept a large amount of their search team and didn't get the cost savings they were planning; Microsoft's ad platform is/was worse than yahoo's.
I don't know too much about what happened after that, but I suspect not having control over the money making apparatus made it hard to control their destiny, and now we have Verizon owning them and finishing up the death spiral.
I joined Yahoo in 2013, and my impression was that it was a company that still made a ton of money, because at one time a lot of really clever people used to work there, and their stuff continued to make money, but the people working there were not clever enough to build on it, they were barely able to keep up on maintenance of it.
I encountered a ton of cool technical solutions to things that were Really Hard Problems in the 90's or 2000's, and that was appropriate for hardware from that era, but the outside world moved on, while everyone inside Yahoo still thought that their shit was hot shit.
There were for sure a lot of smart people still working at the company, but the company had 0 cool factor, so they had an incredibly tough time recruiting and retaining people that could move the state-of-the-art forward.
...and no buzzword management strategy like OKR's or whatever is going to change that fundamental problem.
Wouldn't your comment suggest that management DOES matter then? The person I replied to says that google has terrible management but is successful because of their starting position. As you have pointed out, bad decisions by management can lead to a company's downfall.
Yes. Definitely, sustained poor management can lead to a company's downfall. You have to continually sabotage your company to kill it. Just mediocre management or incoherent management won't do it. (But it might set the stage for worse decisions)
Google does seem to sabotage a lot of its products, but so far hasn't really sabotaged its core products or its company. As long as they don't destroy the dollar printing press (Adwords/search), they can keep pissing away money on dumb things and it won't kill them.
I don't know too much about what happened after that, but I suspect not having control over the money making apparatus made it hard to control their destiny, and now we have Verizon owning them and finishing up the death spiral.