Yahoo has been sold to Verizon in what will go down in history as the transaction that brought it to an end. It was predictable for a company that had only become competitive in the last four years under the command of a woman: Marissa Mayer. 
Before it became just a division of Verizon, which specialized in buying failed companies (such as AOL), Yahoo had the potential that Facebook and Google had at the time. It's just that he didn't have the best strategy for a market that was much more than a search engine.
Yahoo's "death" has two sides. The one that ends with Verizon's acquisition began 18 years ago. Then Google was created, the search engine built on an excellent algorithm created by Larry Page. The second "death" came in 2012, when Marissa Mayer became CEO (chief executive officer - no.).
He was sometimes a heurist, sometimes the most optimistic Yahoo employee. In the end, it was the "black widow" who accepted Verizon's purchase under pressure from everyone - and without finishing all the plans.
In the early 2000's, as before, Yahoo thought it was a media company. I know you used Messenger, Search, Mail and other sites that it had, but they were just digital billboards that this company used to sell advertising. He never saw himself as a software maker, as Google became more and more as it bought more and more companies.
Yahoo was a media trust
with a different strategy than others, which failed because it did not adapt quickly enough to new technologies - especially smartphones. And in 1994, when it came out, it was hard to believe that you could make software that you could distribute (over the Internet!) To hundreds of thousands, millions of devices. At that time, the programs were delivered in boxes. A box similar to the one Yahoo executives have been thinking about since the early 2000s.
You are nostalgic for Messenger, but that was a lucky exception and the only very good product of Yahoo and one that, at the best of times, could become what WhatsApp is now. It wasn't to be, because the vision to create products can't come from people who know (or think they know) just to sell advertising. Mayer would change that approach, but it was too late.
Yahoo's latest big hit was a "trivial" $ 1 billion investment in Alibaba in 2005. That company would become the world's largest online "bazaar" and at the same time lead Yahoo to a paradox: be valued at a few billion, but at the same time have no value. That's because what the old Yahoo used to consume more than it produced, but the shares in the Chinese store brought in a lot of money (all on the stock market, not cash, in stockings).
The last stage of Yahoo's "life" began, ironically, in the same month it ended: in July 2012, Mayer signed the contract of her life (so far).
Larry Page's ex-girlfriend (and sometimes mistress) became the boss over rival Google, a company from which he learned everything he knows - he was also one of the first employees. In an industry where executives like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg wear the same sneakers, the same T-shirts from event to event, Mayer was a refined woman: expensive dresses, ambition, and a clear distancing from what "commoners" and bosses mean. Nothing bad, because others are hypocrites when they are simple and have huge fortunes.
Under Mayer's command,
Yahoo has become what you thought it was: a software company and created or remade great products - News Digest, Weather, the new Mail and Messenger, Flickr, and bought Tumblr. Well, Tumblr may well have brought Yahoo to an end. And do you know why? You don't know, if you're on Tumblr, you don't care, and if you're on Yahoo, you don't know what Tumblr is.
Having Tumblr and Yahoo under the same "umbrella" is like putting a lesbian, tattooed, colorful, vegetarian, and pretty-skinned girl next to Grandma's Christmas table. I exaggerated, but Tumblr is what millennials appreciate, while Yahoo is no longer in vogue since you connected to the internet via dial-up. Mayer saw the potential, paid $ 1.1 billion to a company, but the others didn't know how to make money with it.
There are also failures on her part, especially the big contracts for famous journalists from the United States of America. All she could do was show that she didn't understand exactly how to reconcile the company's "conservatives" - who still believed her to be trust media - and her "futuristic" vision - a cool app maker.
In the end, Marissa Mayer leaves and after her, at the beginning of 2017, there remains a purchase contract through which Yahoo proves its incompetence. It remains a not at all easy path, with decisions always inspired, but it was not the right place for some.
After all these
You should note that the only reason Yahoo! in 2016 and there is more talk in 2017 is the longevity of the company. Two decades and a bit and it was a symbol of the dot com bubble. Now, ironically, at a time when startups are valued at tens of billions of dollars and Microsoft buys LinkedIn for $ 26 billion, Yahoo is selling for almost nothing, and the best decision remains investing in Alibaba. , a decade ago.
But this is the game of companies and technology.
It's time for you to switch from Yahoo Mail to something more stable, and from Messenger to a serious chat service. Otherwise, you can return anytime he sent messages through pigeons and set up landline appointments.