Dumb and Dumber

Two companies notorious for their lack of direction want to get together. They are not without talent. During my short stint at Yahoo! I gained respect for the mundane task of serving bytes, because when you have six hundred million customers, even the easy is hard. I've been a client-side developer for much of my career, and we scaled by selling more units of phones or iPods or whatever. The server side of things is complex, and people who can do it well (by virtue of you not hearing of disasters) are not to be sneered at. Apple has been a juggernaut this decade in seemingly all things, but many of its few failures have involved building servers.

Saving Yahoo! and AOL is actually simple: Decide a direction, brutally remove everything that doesn't fit along that direction, and concentrate your remaining resources on being the best at it. That is, simple to say, not simple to do.