But like Amazon, Yahoo had developed scalable solutions in-house to run Yahoo. That was Amazon's motivation for launching AWS. They had already developed all these solutions for themselves and got the idea to monetize their infrastructure. I don't see why Yahoo couldn't have done the same thing. Plus Yahoo was sitting on Hadoop until it got spun off. And the kicker is Yahoo briefly started to offer enterprise big data solutions and even came up with a killer app that was years ahead of it's time called Pipes. But for some reason Yahoo just abandon everything.
People tend to forget or are to young to know just how big and innovative Yahoo was at one time. I know this may sound strange if you're younger but Yahoo was literally the Google of their era. Yahoo was absolutely *massive* at their height.
In the same year that Google had Borg, and AWS released EC2, at Yahoo, David Filo was still personally reviewing hardware requests.