Microsoft proposes to purchase Yahoo

Robert Cringley has a great piece on how Yahoo was ham strung by Mark Cuban purchasing his broadcast.com business in 1999 for 5.7 billion. Excerpt:

Yahoo, which probably shouldn’t have bought the company at all, overpaid for Broadcast.com in such an epic manner that the deal quickly became a Silicon Valley joke.

Nerds are sensitive and Yahoo, stung by the deal, resolved never to make such a mistake again, and they haven’t. But this determination has come at a cost. Where Yahoo used to shoot from the hip, post-Broadcast.com the company became a model of hard-nosed business analysis, which also meant they couldn’t make up their minds. Business development decisions at Yahoo can take months or years and every deal is required to be the antithesis of Broadcast.com. Companies used to want to be bought by Yahoo, but now they don’t. Whenever fast action was required it didn’t happen and the company fell further and further behind, not because it wasn’t smart, but because it wasn’t brave.