> I knew a bunch of Ex-Yahoos, and they all cited this fact as one of the main reasons they left.
Which was a shame, because they had built something really interesting and nice when it came to the web. Between 2006 and 2008 (give or take) I'd say Yahoo was neck and neck with Google when it came to bringing "cool stuff" to the web. Yahoo! Pipes is still something I think of from time to time after all these years.
Indeed. The ex-Yahoos I worked with were some of the best most talented engineers I've worked with, and the managers were all fantastic too. In its prime Yahoo was a real powerhouse.
I think the thing with Yahoo was that it tried do too much, and it never really had any focus on any particular vertical. Its legacy has always been that it was the place you would go for anything, and I think that hurt it more later on because the company itself was unfocused, and it didn't have a money-printing machine like Google's ads to fund the experimental work.
When Marissa Mayer was on board, the focus was "mobile and emerging products", which was absolutely the right call in 2012, but it was still too general to rally a company around. It had a lot of great small things, but none of them had enough investment to turn into a multi-billion dollar business on its own, as well as a lot of legacy things that still needed to be maintained.
Which was a shame, because they had built something really interesting and nice when it came to the web. Between 2006 and 2008 (give or take) I'd say Yahoo was neck and neck with Google when it came to bringing "cool stuff" to the web. Yahoo! Pipes is still something I think of from time to time after all these years.