Was There Ever Any Hope for Yahoo?

With Marissa Mayer essentially hanging out the "For Sale: Best Offer" sign, and aggressive investors saying the only thing that can save Yahoo is sacking the entire C-suite, it is fair to ask: Is?there anything anyone could have done that might have?turned things around?

I'm not dancing?on just any grave here. I was one of those extremely optimistic tech writers when Mayer left Google to run Yahoo. My Reuters column celebrating that moment was filled with hope that Google employee #20 would be just the one "to fix one of the tech industry’s most infamous basket cases."

And yet, to say?Mayer's stewardship has been unsuccessful is overly simple. Yahoo contemporary AOL also got?a?sharp Googler, but Tim Armstrong was only able to reinvent it as a significantly different (and smaller) company. Armstrong was crazy to even try, my Wired colleague Fred Vogelstein wrote. AOL didn't need fixing, Vogelstein wrote, "it needs a brain transplant." And that's exactly what happened.

But Yahoo had much better?raw material, and its trajectory?was going to be revitalization, not salvage. Yahoo still has one of the biggest audiences in the world, but it's Google that's raking it in. Adding insult to injury, the company which toppled?Yahoo as the search king?just became the largest in the world.

So, what went wrong with Yahoo — or didn't happen?

For one thing, Mayer's Yahoo hasn't created a single must-have app. It paid $1.1 billion for Tumblr when blog platforms were giving way to messaging platforms like Whatsapp (Yahoo's LiveText is DOA) and lightweight social networks like Instagram, which Yahoo's Flickr hasn't dented. Remember Sumly? I thought not. I speculated that the $30 million bet on teenage whiz Nick D’Aloisio's relevance and coherence algo was a bid to turbo-charge search. Nuh uh.

Mayer wasn't able to weave her greatest Google achievement — nurturing talent — into Yahoo's fabric. She created Google's mentoring program, which Wired called?her secret weapon. A bid?to?play to her culture strength backfired with a manual?distributed to staff which <re/code>'s?Kara Swisher said displayed "a mix of stubborn defiance and aggressive cheeriness strewn with the kind of you-can-do-it bromides you might find at a Tony Robbins seminar." Ouch

Yahoo staff seemed alienated, 42% of them were let go, and Mayer was unable to put lipstick on the pig that was an exodus at the top.

Maybe none of the headwind was unavoidable, and maybe that single set of footprints?for the past 3+ years has been Mayer carrying Yahoo longer than it could have soldiered on without her.

But it still isn't clear what the best path for the company is — reinvigorate, pivot, break up — or even what management prefers. Mayer told Reuters that Yahoo will entertain offers but its first priority is the turnaround plan. That seems like a confusing message to the market and to staff.

And another missed opportunity for Yahoo to stake its claim on … something.

Cover Art:?Marissa Mayer?at?the 2015 Fortune Global Forum in San Francisco, Nov. 3, 2015.