That was a serious comment; I'm not being snide. Stack Overflow is the only company I know of in the Q&A space with the deliberate strategy of creating individual Q&A communities for like-minded experts. The strategy of creating one uber-site for everything with a question mark, in our opinion, leads to crappy, low quality sites like Yahoo!Answers, where the current hottest question is "Is my name as weird as i think?"
But you are being snide. You've always done a nice job of framing yourself exclusively against your shittiest competitors. Being better than Yahoo Answers is not something you should be particularly proud of.
A site born out of an existing strong community of clever people can easily sustain QA around that communities' purpose. If it's a general-purpose community, then it'll work just fine: http://ask.metafilter.com is terrific and makes enough from advertising to pay 4 full-time salaries and essentially funds the rest of the site.
It's success was a direct inspiration for the creation of Yahoo Answers. You're well aware of it's existence -- you had one of the Metafilter moderators (Josh Millard) as a guest on your and Jeff's podcast, but you weren't very receptive to what he had to say (Jeff was particularly obtuse). Y'all didn't understand why you needed an outlet site like http://metatalk.metafilter.com -- and then when you implemented http://meta.stackoverflow.com the way you did it exhibited zero comprehension (the worst of which has since been cleaned up).
It's like you refuse to understand how communities really make sites like these function, because to do so would force you to acknowledge that your and Jeff's existing audiences were what made SO work. You've rejected that assertion out of hand over and over, insisting that the innovative design of your social software was primary. We'll see if you can launch successful vertical subsites for things like travel / fashion / music suggestions or parenting / romantic / job advice.
