My first experience with Internet coincided with Yahoo! web site. At that time there were two portal giants for the non-US users. Aside from AOL, that was a darling for the the US customers, we knew only Yahoo! and MSN. I remember my father and his colleagues thought Yahoo! as a door to the internet. Even if they want to go to MSN, they first typed yahoo.com in the browser, of course with http://www. in the beginning, and then they type msn.com.
Following these incidents, as Carol Bartz is fired on the phone, there are lots of speculation that what will happen to the company. The easiest answer is that it should put itself on sale. But what it has to sell? Yahoo! owns a very strong patents portfolio mostly in web search. Moreover, the company owns shares in Alibaba. This is interesting that, in few years, Alibaba may worth more than Yahoo! itself.
Anyways, my problem with Yahoo! as a technical person is that, it owns awesome technology portfolio, and cool web assets but seems no one cares. This is rooted from executives in that company. Recently, I saw one of my friends used some web services in his thesis implementation to map an article contents to spatial data. Additionally, who can forget about BOSS APIs. I just wrote this post to say I am sorry for a company like this to be in hands of incompetent executives who just like to look cool but know/care nothing about real technology. I feel pity for the technical staff there who try hard to come up with awesome stuff but at the end no one care about them. I somehow feel what they feel.