ex-Yahoo here. I left before the Verizon acquisition completed. I still have a bunch of friends who chat about these things. Yahoo never really had many home grown core products except yahoo.com, finance, sports & news. All other Yahoo properties were through acquisitions and Yahoo did a fairly poor job of integrating them. I believe only a handful of old acquisitions were properly integrated. Regardless there was massive overlap in tech that we had and the subsequent acquisitions under Marissa. Most acquisitions barring a couple had poor tech and business numbers and we were surprised at their huge evaluations. Coupled with massive cultural differences and turf wars, things were not going anywhere. I believe this situation exacerbated when Verizon acquired Yahoo and tried merging AOL with it leading to further overlap. It is fun to see how management thought they could beat Google, FB and Amazon with this strategy. The funnier (possibly sadder) thing was Yahoo always had more data on users than all of the acquisitions put together and then some thanks to Mail, Finance, Sports, News and Frontpage. We did not need their tech or their people or their customers. If only management would've gotten their shit together we probably would've been a decent player in the market. However, the leadership did not think Yahoo's tech was capable and the only solution was to acquire tech and talent. They were mistaken. Management was always chasing after the market leaders and never really wanted to differentiate Yahoo for instance we never talked about having privacy focused premium experiences for our users or ad-tech that preserves privacy at the same time helps advertisers reach the correct audience. This would've given users a reason to use Yahoo products and pay for them. Management never focused on building quality products. Barring Finance and Sports all other sites had issues with data quality. Yahoo News was wrecked. It used to be the source of trusted (aka non-fake news). Management never valued it. Imagine if they would've grown it and kept the brand reputation. Today, Facebook, Google are in hot water. Yahoo would've been a hero. Advertisers would've flocked to advertise on Yahoo because users trusted them and they had integrity (advertisers never want to be associated with shitty, bad content. It rubs off the wrong way on their brand identity and product reputation). All lost opportunities. Sigh.