Yahoo has fantastic loyal customers. It also has niche consumer businesses - finance, weather, groups, mail. These are very big niches. However, precisely becau

Yahoo has fantastic loyal customers. It also has niche consumer businesses - finance, weather, groups, mail. These are very big niches. However, precisely because Yahoo is a conglomerate of diverse businesses, it has been difficult to describe Yahoo. Yahoo is a portfolio company. However, Yahoo isn't a credible platform company. Microsoft is. Google is. Apple is. While Yahoo open sources a lot of its internal components, heck, it was one of the earliest adopters of OpenID - my StackOverflow account still uses my Yahoo login - this is not the same as building a platform. Android is a platform. Google apps is a platform. AWS is a platform. Even AdSesnse is a platform. Twitter is a platform. Here's my outline: 1. Yahoo needs to protect their base. Customers might move away from Yahoo mail when eventually people get their own domain names, or when they want to edit documents online on Google Docs. Yahoo should court the small businesses who already use Yahoo to spend more money with them. 2. Yahoo needs to aggressive court developers to leverage Yahoo signins, Yahoo mail to provide new services. If Yahoo would handle the payments, it would be even better. A 30% cut would make Yahoo a great affiliate for many devs trying to get traction. 3. On the Ad front, there is much Yahoo can do to copy Google in terms of display ad networks - once Yahoo has successfully courted smaller businesses.