It’s so easy to forget.

It’s been almost two years since

I last posted a review of companies I admire or avoid (and those in between, companies that are redeemed or endangered). I didn’t mention Yahoo! in that listing, but things have gone from bad to worse for the company that was once nearly synonymous with the success and future of the web.

The first website I ever visited was Yahoo!, more than ten years ago. I still visit their front page many times each day, as I find their handpicked top stories much more relevant than the computer selected headlines from Google News. But, when it comes to searching, I invariably use Google, like the vast plurality of folks on the web today.

To figure out exactly how Yahoo! has fallen so far isn’t an easy task. So many missteps, covering nearly every aspect of Yahoo!’s strategy and operations, have brought it to where it is today. But how far it has fallen is breathtaking. The height of the bubble saw YHOO trading at a split adjusted per share price nearing $120. Today, it’s at about $28.

Many folks today call Google spontaneous or even erratic when it comes to its choice of technologies and products to pursue. But the crown for product ADHD truly belongs to Yahoo!. It seems sometimes it has just about got its finger on the pulse of where to go, only to give up before it secures the rewards. Take Mark Burnett’s new gig with AOL. Yahoo! figured out that it should go in that direction (with Lloyd Braun) way back in 2004. By last year, Yahoo! had already given up.

From failing to capitalize on Flickr, to squandering any lead LAUNCHcast had on iTunes, Yahoo!’s recent past is filled with lost opportunity. It’s history of falling from grace doesn’t end there. Remember Geocities? How about eGroups? DialPad? Konfabulator? So much promise. In most cases, irrecoverable.

If you look, again, at Flickr, 360°, Groups, Mail, del.icio.us, there is barely any cohesion. Google’s theme is something like “power, but simplicity.” Yahoo! can’t even manage to spread its trademark purple through its network, let alone its logo, or some sort of concept theme like Google’s focus on intuitive, robust web applications.

Is Yahoo!’s problem cultural, systemic, bureaucratic? Do the failures fall at the feet of the chief executive? The board? Senior executives? Or everybody? I really don’t know. It’s just surprising to me that years of Yahoo!’s clearly failing to gain back momentum has brought about so little change in direction or strategy or operations. In an industry that moves a million miles a minute, Yahoo! is stuck in the stone age.

I hope someone in Sunnyvale figures that out, preferably before the only thing that’s left of Yahoo! is a pretty purple fossil.