2 steps must be taken first before you can talk about "saving" Yahoo:
1. Get rid of 2/3 of the managers
2. Make engineers the "top dogs" in the company.
A desire and the ability to own problems is difficult to bring back once it is lost.
Google -> Yahoo is a smaller jump away from an engineering driven company than Yahoo -> Tumblr
> Can't imagine a world where Microsoft inspired that much fear :)
"Another big factor was the fear of Microsoft. If anyone
at Yahoo considered the idea that they should be a
technology company, the next thought would have been
that Microsoft would crush them.
It's hard for anyone much younger than me to understand
the fear Microsoft still inspired in 1995. Imagine a
company with several times the power Google has now, but
way meaner. It was perfectly reasonable to be afraid of
them. Yahoo watched them crush the first hot Internet
company, Netscape. It was reasonable to worry that if
they tried to be the next Netscape, they'd suffer the
same fate. How were they to know that Netscape would
turn out to be Microsoft's last victim?"I like his ending statement:
"Hacker culture often seems kind of irresponsible. That's why people proposing to destroy it use phrases like "adult supervision." That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example."
(Containerisation would be absurdly expensive in this world, as you'd need a new Windows Server license for every VM. I think you still do, so nobody does this).
Don't disregard good aesthetic taste, Yahoo clearly doesn't have it.
What demographic are the people you've talked to in?