Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's unclear about it? And/or what do you propose that fits what Yahoo! did (or should have been doing) at any point in its life? Alternatively, provide a clear mission statement than encompasses what any large company with lots of products does -- GE, IBM, Google, etc.
Well for starters it is clearly hyperbole. There is no way Yahoo particularly wanted to be part of everyones porn surfing for example - Tumblr notwithstanding. And you'd find plenty of other niches where Yahoo made no attempt whatsoever to enter. And outside of investment in Alibaba, their involvement in online shopping was marginal. In fact, Yahoo's premium services was always marginal across the board - I spent yea…
It's a little hyperbolic. A realistic refinement would add family friendly and having a decent amount of marketing spend and/or user time spent.
> And outside of investment in Alibaba, their involvement in online shopping was marginal.
Yahoo! Shopping was a decent price comparison tool (and Kelkoo was an acquisition of the same in Europe), and Yahoo! Stores was enabling a lot of small businesses to sell online. Auctions was closed in 2007 (except in Japan), because it's hard to be the number 2 for auctions. Yahoo! Wallet was supposed to make it easier to buy things all over the web by storing your payment credentials in one (trusted) place. There was a person to person payment thing that I can't recall the name of.
> Yahoo! Personals was sold to Match.com
In 2010 -- way into the period where nobody knew what Yahoo! was trying to do.
> To me it's a statement that's basically carte blanche for whatever management happens to want right now, but it's certainly not providing focus.
Yahoo may have been focused on the directory initially, but at least by 1997 it was not a goal to be focused -- there was never one thing Yahoo did to focus around, other than the brand. Even the first archive.org capture from October 1996 has links to random things.
> And while I would interpret it as directed towards media, I suspect it did nothing to e.g. clarify to the company whether Yahoo was a media company or a tech company.
Does it matter if it is a media company or a tech company? The real answer is Yahoo is an eyeballs company. Premium services I guess were technology revenue, but services revenue was never expected to be a large portion of revenue for the company (although certainly it was for some verticals). Yahoo's tech stack enabled small teams to build vertical sites that competed with much larger teams. Yahoo's business stack enabled those small teams to sign large advertisers and content deals. Yahoo's network of sites enabled the small teams to start with lots of eyeballs, without huge marketing spends. Building compelling verticals gets the eyeballs to come back. Having a great internet search product that the eyeballs saw as a great internet search product would have really helped with keeping eyeballs.