What’s Really Wrong With Yahoo? (thru Techdirt)
"The real problem is that Yahoo! is horrible in dealing with acquisitions. When Yahoo! buys a company, its first move is to change the brand name to Yahoo!, thereby destroying the old brand."

I'm not sure I'd put Lycos' acquisition model above Yahoo's, since sites I visited quite often back in 97/98 such as Hotbot or HotWired are more or less stalled. And Yahoo first got me into their registered user base by making my Geocities account a Yahoo account with nothing to do on my part. On the branding issue, it might seem harsh on the long term, but on the longer run it's difficult to sustain that many brands, both internally and in the face of consumers. For instance in 1999 Unilever cut its brands from 1200 to 400.

However, it's true many acquisitions lead to broken links, discontinued services, or other displays of user contempt. Just see how Google dropped MyDeja's features. If a company purchased Yahoo and messed with MyYahoo, I'd sure be mad at them. A brand is only as meaningful as the services or features it came to represent. If you empty its core, its shell won't fool consumers long, except for the few that want to blindly stick to the legend. I for one won't ever buy an overpriced Ford just because there's a Jaguar sticker on it.