I remember working at Yahoo in the late 90's as a barista and watching all the people walking around with HTML for Dummies books under their arms while enjoying their free espresso and chai thinking nah, these guys won't make it.

I remember my friends working at Yahoo in the 2000's being all excited about the cult worship, good perks, then getting cynical about being stifled because they copied everything AOL was doing with project matrix management thinking nah, these guys won't make it.

I remember being at Google watching Marissa Mayer's user profile being delete right after the announcement got out that morning thinking nah, these guys won't make it.

But then I keep remembering, my mom still reads Yahoo Taiwan, uses Yahoo Mail, and sends me Yahoo News links. Then I keep remembering about the hundreds of products with plenty of inertia keeping the overall organization going.

Yahoo's in a great position. They still have good talent, have good traffic, and most importantly they can position themselves to be Apple's best friend by simply being Google's enemy.

Flickr, IntoNow, legacy stuff like Mail, Sports, Trave are still pretty diamonds that needs polish and TLC. They just gotta shore up profit to stay alive while out Google Google.