At the dawn of the Internet Yahoo held the Internet's home page, there were so few sites and Search Engines were so primitive that I remember using Yahoo Direct

At the dawn of the Internet Yahoo held the Internet's home page, there were so few sites and Search Engines were so primitive that I remember using Yahoo Directory to find websites and for many years `ping yahoo.com` was my magic command to tell whether my modem had an Internet connection. My first Internet account and online alias was at Yahoo, I used mail and their personalized home page every day... But then started their decades long decay, whilst the Internet boomed the Yahoo directory became old and static, I moved to searching on Google pretty quickly and jumped when gmail was released with it's unprecedented 1GB of free space. Around the same time my Yahoo mail became my junk account, my personalized Yahoo home page started bit rotting, my Internet connectivity command became `ping google.com` and I never went back to searching on Yahoo. They also jacked up prices of Yahoo domains by 300-400%, violating existing customers trust and prompted me to go shopping for a new service provider pretty quickly. Although I've been disconnected from all things Yahoo, I imagine it's been operating in its own niche corner of the Internet, I'm told Yahoo mail has hundreds of million users (my Junk account likely counted), I'd be interested in the number of active accounts and their demographics, my guess goes to an aging population. It's now been years since I heard anything positive coming out of Yahoo, they've hit the news with MS's failed acquisition, switching search engines and CEO churn - but otherwise I can't recall anything new coming from Yahoo that wasn't M&A. They seem like a draconian company holding onto legacy labor-intensive degrading assets which happens to be sitting on a gold mine with their Alibaba investment. I don't see how the current structure is capable of re-inventing itself so stream-lining their existing operations and trimming off dead-weight and losses seems like the only way forward. If they ever have a chance to becoming a tech force again they need new blood and talent pretty quickly. Fortunately they have the resources to make something but I only see it coming from outside of Yahoo, if I was them I would look at using their resources funding young, talented and innovative startups that aligns with their growth and business interests, e.g. they could mandate all ad-supported startups must use Yahoo Ads. Even with all the Talent Google has, many of their most valuable assets like Android and YouTube came from acquisitions. With Yahoo's brain drain I suspect that's going to be the only way we're going to see a resurgence from them.