[ogou]

Yahoo and AOL are kept on life support only to give Verizon MAU and DAU metrics. They add to the numbers of “total active users” for the corporation as a whole. Email keeps them around. Interestingly Yahoo had a large engineering army it inherited from the offshoring to India movement of 2000s. Much of that engineering capital was left idle as the services wound down. The amount of redundant Drupal layers built to justify their presence was shocking to hear about. Whole families had moved to Sunnyvale banking on long careers at Yahoo. Many are returning now. I picked all this up anecdotally as a contractor there a few years ago. The Yahoo story will make an interesting book someday.