To be fair, they WERE early adopters, that's how they ended up on Yahoo in the first place. It's the GMail crowd who showed up late, when everyone was getting webmail.
I was an active Internet user before/during Yahoo!'s rise -- it was NEVER the choice of technical early-adopters. (Flickr kinda was, as an acquisition, in a narrow space)
It was always the kinda-dowdy boring brand for non-technical people. Even at the very beginning it wasn't even the go-to link list for smart/knowledgeable people. Yahoo! Mail was for people who were too unresourced to have their own mail accounts or maintain university/work/etc. accounts.
... But who had dial-up. Seriously, same with AOL. 99% of people had never even heard of the Internet until the late-90s. As much as we disparage them now, they really were ahead of the crowd back then.
