Some things certainly changed. Coming in via the Overture acquisition (a company that was basically printing money and had one of the highest revenue-per-employee in the web industry), Yahoo felt extremely cost-conscious. For example, there was (and still is) a much hated process you have to go through to get any hardware purchase approved. So, that part of what pg said didn't ring true to me.

However, the ambivalence about being a tech company was definitely still there. The politics and the decision-making by people who didn't really understand tech was still there.

There's a lot of variation between divisions in Yahoo, but where I was was definitely not "hacker-centric". Projects were managed as massive waterfall efforts. Innovations by technologists were basically impossible to launch or test unless you had the right people in upper management backing you. There were these "Hack Days" that happened occasionally which some people in the company seemed to really enjoy. I don't know anyone in my division who ever participated in one, because we were too busy "getting real work done" and our management wasn't going to let people take a day or two off when we had deadlines to meet.