I never understood why Yahoo got so wrapped around the axle with the search engine business. I used to use Yahoo a lot to start my web browsing and I liked the fact that it wasn't a search engine. They provided broad categories that you could click on and you could keep drilling down to more specific categories until you found relevant websites. Not always the best way to search the web but it was great when you didn't know exactly what you are looking for. They could have easily continued to categorize and curate the web that way and provided a nice alternative to search engines, especially for non-power users. In addition to that Yahoo had so many successful components back in the day that had they spent even a modicum of money and development effort they would have continued to be a significant force on the web. Things like Yahoo Travel and Yahoo Groups still don't have a decent alternative these days. I still mourn the loss of some Yahoo Groups I used to participate in. Yahoo Finance was once one of the best places on the internet to research stocks and investments. Yahoo Mail was ahead of Gmail for many years and only through years of neglect finally let everyone else catch up, their lack of spam filtering was what finally killed my Yahoo mail account for me. Yahoo Briefcase could've been Dropbox or Google Drive 10 years before Dropbox existed. Heck Yahoo even had news aggregation years before Google did. Yahoo dominated fantasy football for many years. The fact that they couldn't grow and monetize any or all of these successful components was simply due to a complete lack of vision and leadership.