What it meant to me was that Yahoo couldn't help itself from taking every successful product or acquisition and screwing it up, deprecating it or otherwise wholly missing why its users valued it.
These have been listed in greater detail elsewhere, but Y! Games is one of the most glaring examples where they had a massive, loyal audience and just destroyed the community bit by bit.
Flickr is the other commonly sited example where Yahoo just didn't seem to understand why the users valued it so much. Every year they'd nerf some core aspect of the product trying to turn it into something less useful but more "trendy".
Finally, for me, the "my.yahoo.com" customizable landing page / rss feed had enormous utility and huge potential but was just left to rot.
> but Y! Games is one of the most glaring examples where they had a massive, loyal audience and just destroyed the community bit by bit.
I'm sorry, but at least we tried when I was there, and if it hadn't been one of Filo's babies, it would have been killed long before we got to take a stab at it.
I think useful in this case is pretty clear with the WD-40/duct tape example; hardly the best-in-class solution, but when you just need a simple, short-term solution, then Yahoo! should be the place to go.
In the same fashion that excel is the default go-to tool for any kind of basic data management (and now to a certain degree superceded by google spreadsheets), Yahoo! would have been the default place to go basic image hosting, basic blogging, basic chatting, basic news; A good enough solution to meet the 80% of common problems
These have been listed in greater detail elsewhere, but Y! Games is one of the most glaring examples where they had a massive, loyal audience and just destroyed the community bit by bit.
Flickr is the other commonly sited example where Yahoo just didn't seem to understand why the users valued it so much. Every year they'd nerf some core aspect of the product trying to turn it into something less useful but more "trendy".
Finally, for me, the "my.yahoo.com" customizable landing page / rss feed had enormous utility and huge potential but was just left to rot.