Imagine that, a company that's interested in making money....
The thing I love most about Yahoo! is the breadth and, more importantly, the integration of their various services. I can upload a series of digital photos, select one to be used in a web greeting card, select an alias from my email address book, and send it all off at once without having to make a single round trip. Or I can go to their yellow pages site, search for a business address, and automatically generate a map and driving directions to it. Their online shopping mall lets me check out items from a dozen different stores and check out items from them all at once using a single wallet account. Their My Yahoo! portal allows me to combine world news, a Google-powered search engine, new movie reviews, and the balance in my checking account all on one page. It's the ultimate one-stop shop.
The genius behind Yahoo! is that they don't pull a Microsoft to get where they are today. Yahoo! almost never acquires anything -- neither search engines, nor stores, nor banks, nada. They partner with other sites, like MapQuest and Google and Reuters, to produce great content with minimal overhead. And if a new search engine or mapping site comes out tomorrow that's significantly better, they can switch over to it with the flip of a contract. It's hyperlinking taken one step further, and it's made them one of the few true success stories on the Internet.