Pretty well, considering they are still around more than a decade after they stopped being "cool". They're not trendy in tech circles, they are just a business that makes money.

Yahoo and Facebook are time-wasters... Time-wasters are basically unprofitable

Yeah, unprofitable to the tune of $600 million a year. That's Yahoo's net profit last year.

I swear to god, the blindness of people to anything that's not hip right now is amazing. People assume because they personally stopped caring about something that it must have failed.

That could just be investors / analysts being stupid (either the ones valuing alibaba too highly, or valuing Yahoo too low). But Yahoo doesn't make a ton of money off its core business.

It's still quite possible for them to turn it around. They are really very good at what they, and they have the eyeballs.

At the same time, I don't think Yahoo is purely money-minded. From what I read, they were the only company which challenged the FISA orders last year (even before the Snowden leaks).

Look at Lycos. Excite. Altavista. Even the nominal survivors like AOL are largely shadows of their old selves. Frankly, it's fairly impressive that they've held out. Consider their starting point: Just a directory.

The bubble in retrospect makes them look faded and tired, because they're "only" $36bn today. But $36bn is $36bn...

And being "the default homepage" with an audience so much smaller was a much less impressive position to be in than their current reach.

In addition, $590 million is not Yahoo's net income, but their pretax income from operations. In other words, excluding Alibaba.

Here's the breakdown for 2013, in thousands:

    Income from operations         589,926
    Other income, net               43,357
   -----------------------------------------
    Provision for income taxes    (153,392)
    Earnings in equity interests   896,675
   =========================================
    Net income                   1,376,566

See 10-K at Yahoo's investor relations site: http://investor.yahoo.net/sec.cfm

That's a ~14% (artificial) boost in profit that takes them from "$65M down on 2012" (bad) to "$23M up on 2012" (adequate).

2 things about Yahoo:

1) I'm still paying for their email service, and have been for 10 years. Their UI redesigns have been horrendous at times, but email lockin is powerful.

2) I really don't think dominance on the internet should be expected or desired, just because its possible. There's an example below about Yahoo Japan "owning" auctions in Japan. Sure, eBay has cornered peer-to-peer non-local vending in the US (let's not kid oursevelves what "auctions-buy-now" really are), but why should they be the preferred platform in Japan? Yes the internet allows it, but in the end, for a variety of historic and social reasons, different companies will fill different niches in different places, even if the internet looks like one gigantic niche and place. In other words, there is very little benefit seen from dominating auctions in US and Japan. Sure a few people would be able to order items more easily across the Pacific, but that effect pales in comparison to other internal factors. Maybe some local website had a marketing deal with a popular franchise in a certain country and got more popular initially, and then dominated that local market by network effect.

To summarize: I think it's normal to have local companies cornering local markets at the country/cultural level, even though the internet and e-commerce could theoretically be dominated globally. Google and search is a unique case, and expecting all companies to be like them in every market is misguided. I think that leaves a lot of space for Yahoo and many other similar companies to survive.

Is that supposed to be snark? I realize they're not fashionable, but Yahoo is still quite successful.