Why? It's a network of Web sites with fairly generic functionality, like a content publishing system (frontpage, news, sports, tech, health), a search engine querying Bing API, Web-based email and a few other projects.
If you were building such a project from scratch, would you just not get anything off the ground without hiring 12,500 full-timers first? Most likely you would.
There are several structural inefficiencies to Yahoo!, most of them rely on 1990 processes in areas such as ad sales (which are still strongly salespeople-driven, try to buy a premium ad with your credit card, for example), low investment in automation and tooling, low amount of shared code across the Web properties (no common UI element library, for example, just guidelines), and structure that lends itself to hiring as many product managers as possible to coordinate all those inefficiencies across various products.
If you were building such a project from scratch, would you just not get anything off the ground without hiring 12,500 full-timers first? Most likely you would.
There are several structural inefficiencies to Yahoo!, most of them rely on 1990 processes in areas such as ad sales (which are still strongly salespeople-driven, try to buy a premium ad with your credit card, for example), low investment in automation and tooling, low amount of shared code across the Web properties (no common UI element library, for example, just guidelines), and structure that lends itself to hiring as many product managers as possible to coordinate all those inefficiencies across various products.