I also worked at Yahoo at that time, and I remember the feelings internally were more mixed. It was known that nearly all (or even more than 100%) of Yahoo's ma

I also worked at Yahoo at that time, and I remember the feelings internally were more mixed. It was known that nearly all (or even more than 100%) of Yahoo's market value was the investment in Alibaba. Microsoft's offer basically valued all of Yahoo minus Alibaba and minus Yahoo Japan basically at nothing. And I'm perplexed by your blame on Jerry Yang, as out of the entire history of Yahoo, his Alibaba investment was the most financially successful act, worth more than anything any CEO at Yahoo had ever done combined. Also remember at that time that Google, MSN, and Yahoo were the three major search engines at that time. It wasn't clear why Yahoo couldn't close on the #1 spot. It had the clear #1 search engine spot in Japan already. The Yahoo properties (combination of all their websites) was the most popular websites on the internet. They had a much stronger machine learning and data mining research lab, one year bragging that they swept all the best paper awards at the ML/DM computer science conferences.