It is saddening to see names like Yahoo going through so much trouble, but there seems to be an inevitability here that many knew about for a long time. Yahoo,

It is saddening to see names like Yahoo going through so much trouble, but there seems to be an inevitability here that many knew about for a long time. Yahoo, after Marissa Mayer took over, also seems to have focused more on revenue from graphical ads compared to getting any revenue directly from users. * Although mail may be a good product for Yahoo (as this article states), it's not really improved over time and has in fact gotten worse. * The previous Yahoo Mail Plus, which was $20 a year for an ad-free experience with some extras (like POP email) was replaced with a who-would-even-want-this $50 a year ad-free option. Frankly, I doubt if many people even bothered to get this one, more so because among the people who started email with the likes of Hotmail and Yahoo, multiple email addresses were the norm (they continue to be so). For such users who stuck with Yahoo, there's no way to justify spending more than a hundred dollars a year for email. * With no sign of IMAP in the paid option while Google has been giving free IMAP for years, Yahoo's offering in email was really substandard. * Yahoo mail is still quite slow. Not the interface, but the backend. Sending a mail to oneself (by a CC when replying or emailing someone) still takes several minutes to show up in the inbox. In Gmail, this would be in the inbox in a second or two. * Yahoo mail's spam filtering is many a times as bad as a coin toss. Emails that you mark as Not Spam for specific senders continue to go to the spam folder for subsequent mails from the same sender. Many emails that are true spam and have been marked as such don't seem to put similar mails in the spam folder. * The vertical graphical ads on the right side, in an attempt to avoid ads from going off screen while scrolling through emails, are really annoying. * Flickr, providing an astonishing 1TB of storage for "free" (with ads). The next paid option is $50 a year just to remove ads (double of what Flickr Pro used to cost). What??? * Any value assigned to user experience before was completely eliminated through these "more ads" move, where Yahoo was sure that almost nobody would opt for the paid options. I wonder what would've happened if Yahoo had instead lowered the prices even more for an ad-free option, added some useful features (like IMAP in email) in a tiered pricing structure and made the product better (like handling email delivery quickly). Perhaps it's too late to wonder about these though. If Yahoo isn't bought by one of the top five tech companies, its products will likely disappear within the next decade.