It's the end of an era. The popular Yahoo web site and search engine is in pain and economic distress. Why? Yahoo didn't change with the times.

Google came from nowhere and built a better search engine, more advertising revenue, a better business model, huge profits, and stock at an obscene price.

Yahoo remained Yahoo.

Then along came MySpace and FaceBook and Flickr and countless other online sites with their own specific charm and community. Yahoo began to look old and tired and beige and plastic.

The final straw was when I removed Yahoo as the default home page on my computer's browser.

Yahoo missed the boat. The community boat. The boat with tools the community can use to build the community. MySpace has tools. FaceBook has tools. Internet users are flocking to both in droves and leaving Yahoo in a similar number of droves, whatever number that may be. Whatever number it is it isn't what it was.

Droves of online web page viewers drive page views which drive advertising views which drive advertising revenue which drives profits which drives a stock's price. At least, that was the way it was with Yahoo and Google.

With MySpace and FaceBook, not so much. Whatever business model the two have is devoid of revenue, devoid of profits, but not devoid of users flocking and investors clamoring. Both are worth billions though no one can find that pesky spreadsheet which surely shows why and how.

Remember eBay? Remember Skype, the free internet computer-to-computer telephone service? eBay spent billions to procure the hundreds of millions of Skype users. eBay's executives couldn't find that pesky spreadsheet with all the revenue and profit numbers, either.

Skype did for eBay what Yahoo is doing to itself and it involves an unnatural use of body parts in a figuratively obscene act.

Yahoo, the writing is on the wall. Goodbye, so long, farewell. Change or die.