>Rather, Yahoo’s existing products didn’t work on mobile.<p>I wonder what this is referring to. All the Yahoo products I'm familiar with (admittedly not many of them), could be adapted to mobile. Yahoo Answers could have become completely addictive if easily accessible. Looking at a list of all their other services on Wiki, I can't find a single one that "[wouldn't] work on mobile".<p>The phrase "didn't work" is a cop out. If something "won't work" or "isn't possible", then you just haven't thought of a good way to make it. Don't pretend like things can't adapt and change.
It's kind of tragic to see them be late to the party that they helped invent. The first apps for the iPhone were powered by Yahoo and the YUI library was pretty usable on mobile early on.<p>The talent was there, the leadership was not.
Yahoo had all the products needed to be relevant again. What was needed is deep integration between these products. For instance, using Pipes in Yahoo Mail to create a custom Flickr feed. That's service integration. How about updating Groups UX/UI ? this product is obviously useful why does it look like it was made in 2000 ? Or is there so much technical debt that one cannot touch any code without having to rewrite everything at Yahoo ?
Was Yahoo ever big outside of the US? For me it's always been some invisible, but persisting, corner of the Internet. Admittedly I've used some of the services they have acquired (like Flickr and RocketMail), but none of the core products I think.<p>Search was dominated by AltaVista up until Google, and for news and website index services I would have used local papers and link collections. I don't really even know what else was in their offering.
How does Yahoo make money and how did its sources of revenue change over time? Ads?<p>In search, Yahoo was handily beaten by Google, and competing against Microsoft and Baidu for the rest. For webmail, Google won out, and Microsoft and Yahoo tried to hang on. For ads, Google and Facebook trounced Yahoo. Flickr was caught unaware by the rise of Instagram, and Tumblr resulted in them acquiring a massive social graph, but no clear ability to monetize it.<p>Facebook (& Instagram), Google (& Gmail, Youtube), Amazon, Twitter are all sites you'd visit while logged-in, so they can target ads better. Yahoo's properties no longer draw the volume of userbase that remains logged-in all the time, partially because you can get full benefit of their primary property (Yahoo.com) without logging in, and partly because fewer people use their gated properties in preference to their competitors.<p>But I'm not sure what they could've done to stop this. Microsoft is in a very similar boat, and their first attempt to adopt Google's strategy to get Microsoft content into everyone's hands faltered at the hands of third-party app developers. Their second attempt, with Windows 10, might succeed. Yahoo likely won't and can't take that route, so their hands are rather tied.
I often think, given the number of uses of Yahoo Mail, that a social network addition would have been extremely popular. I don't think the problem was ever mobile, it was not seeing that the wind was blowing to social networks and internalizing that. They even had the best photo site to post pictures on.