Finance, news, fantasy-sports, email, messenger, groups, My Yahoo!, Delicious, Flickr... They're all useful. I agree these are useful, but they weren't very go

Finance, news, fantasy-sports, email, messenger, groups, My Yahoo!, Delicious, Flickr... They're all useful. I agree these are useful, but they weren't very good businesses. Take email. Email is useful. Most of us use it every day, arguably for more important communications than facebook. Still, facebook is a massive business and email is barely a business at all, generally. Yahoo was blinkered by chances at big wins for the same reason VCs and nearly anyone in that game is, they're very, very big relative to the medium sized ones. core vision... they kind of lost that game. The first vision was the directory, which is really just search with a different back-end. This turned out to be an excellent business, but they didn't realize what they had.^ Google ate the whole pie. The 2nd vision was content, to be a sort of online publication/media business. They half abandoned the first vision for this one. Your examples mostly fit here. This turned out to be (mostly) a terrible business type, and the wide, generalist variant that type which yahoo was going for turned out to be even worse. I don't really know what they could have done from the early 2000s onwards. Your core vision needs to be, the core of what you do. There wasn't a core anymore. ^even though they basically invented adwords, the business model for that business.