Yahoo! has lost its reputation within geek circles. Google have not only put out really great products, they also go to great lengths to boast about their vastly superior technologies (BigTable, MapReduce), which gets them a lot of (well-deserved) geek love. Then there are Android and Chrome (with V8), both of which are pretty exciting to hackers. Also, Summer of Code, Code Jam etc. get Google a lot of street cred.
So, from a tech standpoint, Yahoo! isn't very exciting. They're still the same old portal website from the 90's. But for the average guy, Yahoo! still gives him what he needs, when he needs it. Non-tech people don't like to hop from one place to another.
I haven't been to any of Yahoo!'s services for over an year now, but that doesn't mean they're irrelevant.
I agree with you about the "not exciting" part, but I disagree about their reputation in geek circles - at least "real" geek circles and not just tech digerati that are obsessed only with what is changing and new and what drives traffic to their blog sites.
Yahoo pump out loads of tech stuff all the time - YUI, Hadoop, YSlow, YUI Compressor are all hugely respected and popular tools. They've write articles and published research that are almost definitive references for things like web site optimization. They have a boat load of web service APIs that are used all over the place and some of them are very innovative. It's worth just browsing around http://developer.yahoo.com/ to see all the stuff they have going.
(No, I don't work for Yahoo or have any association.)
Don't forget YQL, the weather APIs, Pipes, and Flickr. I personally think BOSS was a bit mishandled, but it has really great potential, as does YAP/YOS.
Yahoo is one of the largest collection of professional web developers, and they take that seriously. Of course, their money is in Average Joe offerings like News and Frontpage.
I do work for them, and for a developer offering team too boot, so this is quite biased, of course ;)
I concur. Y-Slow (and Smush.it) and Firebug are absolutely essential to my workday. Yahoo gets lots of geek cred from me there. (Their CX design is terrible though and Yahoo small business just went to charging $30+ per year for domain registration. WTF?)
So, from a tech standpoint, Yahoo! isn't very exciting. They're still the same old portal website from the 90's. But for the average guy, Yahoo! still gives him what he needs, when he needs it. Non-tech people don't like to hop from one place to another.
I haven't been to any of Yahoo!'s services for over an year now, but that doesn't mean they're irrelevant.