IT's amazing that something so simple as a not having a clear vision/mission could take down a successful company but that's the essentially what happened at Yahoo! When I worked there in 2004 it was just confused, chasing competitors and ideas, never deciding on what it wanted to be when it grew up. I left a year or so later and from what I saw it never figured itself out.
I always wanted the company to focus on a mission about being "useful" - like the digital WD-40/duck tape of your life. Finance, news, fantasy-sports, email, messenger, groups, My Yahoo!, Delicious, Flickr... They're all useful. They could have continued to happily and profitably offer all of these services - and expanded to dozens more - under the mantra of being useful to our every day lives, but Yahoo! was never content with that. They wanted to be eBay, or Google, or Facebook, or YouTube or whoever else was a big player at the time, instead of focusing on the customer loyalty they had already generated.
Having that clear core vision/mission seems like a small thing, but not having one crippled Yahoo! and caused infighting, turnover and confusion that eventually killed it. (Oh, and also Mayer was an idiot.)
I always wanted the company to focus on a mission about being "useful" - like the digital WD-40/duck tape of your life. Finance, news, fantasy-sports, email, messenger, groups, My Yahoo!, Delicious, Flickr... They're all useful. They could have continued to happily and profitably offer all of these services - and expanded to dozens more - under the mantra of being useful to our every day lives, but Yahoo! was never content with that. They wanted to be eBay, or Google, or Facebook, or YouTube or whoever else was a big player at the time, instead of focusing on the customer loyalty they had already generated.
Having that clear core vision/mission seems like a small thing, but not having one crippled Yahoo! and caused infighting, turnover and confusion that eventually killed it. (Oh, and also Mayer was an idiot.)