Infographic: The Rise and Fall of Yahoo!

Botched outsourcing, Ponzi scheme accusations, and bad corporate hires are just some of the reasons for Yahoo!'s downfall.

On a day when both of Carol Bartz and Tim Morse are being referred to as “

,” it's interesting (if not a little fun) to look back on the rise and fall of Yahoo!

. While this

is a too old to contain the latest developments, it perfectly illustrates the problems that the company is facing today. Take, for example, the shutting of Geocities, which (according to the infographic below) eliminated $3.6 billion from Yahoo!'s bottom line. Most recently, Yahoo! outsourced its shopping content to PriceGrabber, its personals to Match.com, and its real estate to Zillow. While this likely gave Yahoo! a new source of ad revenue, you have to wonder: at what cost was this new revenue obtained? If, for example, the contribution margin was greater with Yahoo! Personals than with the ad dollars acquired from Match.com, then Yahoo! is worse off than before. That, however, pales in comparison to the claim made by Paul Graham, who said that Yahoo! was the “

.”