Earlier, it was Google's % share of searches vs Yahoo's: a rather stark and quantitative loss every quarter and every year. Now, I'm not quite sure what it is but at the very least it is not that.
Changing the story changed their destiny.
I knew of a profitable print publication that had a readership of about 90,000 people in the 1980's. But management saw other publications in similarly sized niches that had 100,000. They fought tooth and nail to get those extra 10,000 readers and spent incredible amounts of money to get them. But it actually pushed them into the red.
There's something very powerful about focusing on your real market and doing what you're good at.
Yahoo now has a clear goal of becoming and acting like the number 1 content company on the web. I think this clarity will bring positive results.
http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch02_Have_an_Enemy.php
The nice thing about the Apple-Microsoft deal is that everyone still knew that Microsoft was Apple's enemy.