What if Yahoo! (YHOO:Nasdaq - news) did everything right and nobody cared?

That's the sense I got listening to the company's third-quarter conference call Tuesday afternoon. Not only was the quarter not a disaster, Yahoo! blew away the numbers -- just like the good old days.

Revenue, at $295 million, was up 90% year over year and weighed in at $5 million greater than what the Street's loudest whisperers had hoped. Earnings before gobbledygook were Ciscoian. Translation: A penny better than the consensus expectations. International sales as a percentage of the total were up (16% vs. 10% a year ago), gross margins of 87% were a point better than the top end of the targeted range, and exposure to "financially questionable" clients hasn't worsened.

And yet, only chief cheerleader Michael Parekh (Note to investigate: Does the call-in software know how to give the analyst for the company's lead investment-banking underwriter the first question in an earnings call?) of Goldman Sachs brought forth an old-fashioned "Congratulations!" How very 1999.

The rest of the analysts, and, indeed, Parekh himself, were probing, pushing, kicking, wanting to know what the future holds.

And the future, according to Timothy Koogle, Yahoo!'s CEO (who looks a lot like Dr. Zachary Smith in the old Lost in Space television series, but with longer hair), is that Yahoo! will be one of the handful of media outlets that gets a lion's share of all advertising.

We've heard this song before, and it's a good one. But guess what? It's not good enough to justify Yahoo! being worth, as George Mannes pointed out Tuesday morning, about 140 times 2001 earnings.

Yahoo! is more than doubling its earnings per share and nearly doubling its revenue. And it undoubtedly is taking share away from lesser lights in the Internet world. I'm a true believer in its new-agey "fusion" marketing concept whereby it works with in-for-the-long-haul advertisers like Pepsi and Barnes & Noble to craft multimedia ad packages. This is one great company.

However, none of this matters much when valuations suddenly matter again. And they matter, as one veep hopeful might say, Big Time. Because even if Yahoo! is one of the few left standing, then eventually it catches up to its $47 billion market value, and its growth has slowed to that of other giant, successful, media companies (who, by the way, generate their own content), and it's paying its employees big salaries to work in godforsaken Santa Clara, Calif.

Not a pretty picture. It reminds me of Dell Computer (DELL:Nasdaq - news) and an article on Dell in the current issue of Fortune. I read the article carefully because after laying out all of the challenges Dell faces (stagnant margins, declining demand for PCs, stiff competition), the article promised to tell how Dell would reignite its once torrid growth. Instead, the article basically reviewed what a great operation Dell is (no argument) and suggested that Dell eventually will be a storage powerhouse.

If Dell's going to be a storage powerhouse, I'd be more concerned for EMC (EMC:NYSE - news) than optimistic for Dell. The point is that a company can be the very best and still not grow the way it did or capture the imagination of investors the way it once did.