If you want an excellent engineer, you need to pay at least reasonable.

Quite obvious. They were stupid in the past, they are stupid now, why should anyone believe them.

As long as they have one primary cash-cow, they can do arbitrarily bad management of the rest. And they do. For MS it is Office and Windows, but these seem to be getting more and more shaky, hence the desperate attempt to get onto phones and tablets by giving the desktop OS the same GUI. Still, even with that MS can waste a lot of money. They have gotten more careful though, at least that is my impression. Apples is a different case, they were close to death and know it. They _are_ very careful. But Google is not. Look at all the projects they scrap. Look at all the acquisitions nobody has ever heard from again. They have ads, search, Gmail and maybe maps to fuel that statistics for the Ads and that is it. Everything else Google has does not produce revenue. Still, they are doing really well cash-flow wise. Not that anybody really smart wants to work for them today, but they get enough of the not quite so smart ones.

The key word being "fatal", as in "starting the end-game". You are quite right though that there were a lot of bad decisions before, and it looks likely that the worst decision was actually not tumblr, when I think about it, but hiring the new CEO. So, yes, I stand corrected.

I was thinking the same thing ;-)

Indeed. I like to amuse me with occasionally reading these stories from 3-5 years back. They basically never pan out.

You misunderstand. While batteries have (more or less) constant discharge voltages, the energy density of a capacitor is linearly dependent on maximum voltage and capacity and the output voltage drops quadratic with the energy removed. That is fundamentally different from (chemical) batteries. You have the problem that in order to use the charge of a capacitor fully, you have to be able to use voltages much less than their maximum voltage and step that up. While Power-MOS has gotten better, it is not there yet. And even then, the energy-densities are just far too bad to make it worthwhile.

Supercaps _cannot_ tolerate higher voltages and increasing their capacity decreases their voltage tolerance. They will always have low energy density unless somebody makes a breakthrough on the insulation front. At this time they are about a factor of 10 below batteries and that makes them completely unusable for anything as energy-intensive as a mobile phone.

Indeed. I think I read that also and it was one of the moments that reinforced my belief that most CEOs do not have a clue how their business works.

Hmm. Interesting! I just learned something.

Of course I am talking about the Linux Kernel when I am talking about Linux. That the GNU tool-chain is not Linux-specific but available on a range of platforms is well known, no need to state the obvious.

Actually, the reason that Linux is not UNIX is that it is not derivative. The certification is entirely secondary and nobody cares about it.

No, stupid. The decision of a CEO desperate to find something that works. Betting on the wrong horse is a time-honored tradition with inexperienced CEOs. Some get lucky, but not this time.

Indeed. At Google that did not matter, as they have heaps of money to throw after one bad project and acquisition after another and still be very profitable. At Yahoo, this will just kill the company, even if it may take a while.

Current stock prices are not a predictor for the future. Well understood by anybody that cared to find out.

Indeed. I have never, ever dealt with anybody to technologically incompetent as Yahoo. I had to remove a domain subscription from them as after talking to 14 different customer "service" reps, I still had not found anybody that understood the basics of the DNS system. Yes, I wanted to use my own servers, and while nobody else had a problem with that, Yahoo did not even understand the question.

Guess that is the beginning of a series of fatal decisions that will seal Yahoo's fate. None of those making these bad decisions will suffer for it though.