Yahoo! has been trying to reinvent themselves as well as reinvent their biz model.
After suffering through the advert downturn, they are looking for new revenue streams from commercialization of their site, partnering and premium services.
The great thing about the internet is that you can always find another site which can meet your needs, unless of course your site has proprietary content. Of course, its only a matter of time before your content shows up somewhere else anyway.
If anything, it shows us that in order to succeed, one needs to have differentiated content and technology. Content or technology that is easily commoditized offers minimal value, and marketability of your brand name is tied to user retention.
Well good luck to them anyway. I'm sure all those Stanford types will figure something out eventually.
