Different? No. Its simply repeating past mistakes. Tumblr makes no financial sense. If they wanted to bring in talent to innovate, they could simply buy fifty bootstrapped startups for 5% of the Tumblr deal. That would net them the people they would have wanted. The only reason Tumblr is being bought is due to how Yahoo is showing off to the market. The CEO is simply trying to position Yahoo as bullish. Wall street will rejoice, their stock goes up (for a short time), and the shareholders rejoice. But this sort of thing does not last a long time.
I think it's not about bringing money to the company, but giving a new image to Yahoo. People are going to associate tumblr, which is something pretty new and cool on the internet, with yahoo. Which is? Maybe a mail? A search engine? Nobody knows anymore.
