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.
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.