What Went Wrong At Yahoo 162
kjh1 writes "Paul Graham writes about what he felt went wrong at Yahoo. He has first-hand experience — his company, Viaweb, was bought by Yahoo and he worked there for a while. In a nutshell, he felt that Yahoo was too conflicted about whether they were a technology company or a media company. 'If anyone at Yahoo considered the idea that they should be a technology company, the next thought would have been that Microsoft would crush them.' This in part led to hiring bad programmers, or at least not going single-mindedly after the very best ones. They also lacked the 'hacker' culture that Google and Facebook still seem to have, and that is found in many startup tech companies. 'As long as customers were writing big checks for banner ads, it was hard to take search seriously. Google didn't have that to distract them.'"
Nothing went wrong at Yahoo (Score:2, Insightful)
Nothing went wrong at Yahoo because Yahoo never had anything of value to sell. It was all Internet bubble hype. They had a semi-decent email offering and a web catalog. It's amazing they did as much as they did.
I Remember (Score:4, Insightful)
I remember the days when Yahoo search was the only search engine you worried about (97 - 2001-ish).
This reads as a cautionary tale about being a first mover. You may be on top one day, but you are trading the flexibiltiy of a start up for predictable lines of revenue that may not last. There are times when it is better to let someone else go first and build your strategy around what they are doing wrong.
M
Re:What went wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, I'm not meteorologist, but I think comparing Google to a hurricane is a piss poor comparison.
Google came to be because there was an opportunity in the market, and a very large one at that.
Saying that "Google happened" like it was some inevitable event pre-planned on the timeline of the Earth is a very poor reason for why Yahoo failed.
Yahoo, in every thing they've done has had the upper hand, and let it slip away. They grab a market, and fail to innovate beyond that. They get greedy with big checks from advertisers and can't see beyond that.
I've been watching it for years. Yahoo lets another one of its markets or products just slip away as they refuse to innovate, and let another company sweep in and take it away.
Jerry Yang (Score:4, Insightful)
Facebook (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I Remember (Score:5, Insightful)
What universe did you live in? There was a little thing AltaVista in that time period.
Oh Yahoo (Score:4, Insightful)
The only thing I remember about yahoo was back in 1995-96 when it was nothing but a single webpage with lots of links maintained by some chinese guy. Essentially that's what it remains..
Re:Switch to Google (Score:5, Insightful)
That''s what actually made google the most popular.
You had competitors who were cramming all they could into a page - then google came out with their "Banner + two buttons" and that was it.
I used to use Altavista before.
Re:Nothing went wrong at Yahoo (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What went wrong? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Nothing went wrong at Yahoo (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words, the problem with Yahoo is that it didn't scale. Failure was designed in. If the internet succeeded then Yahoo had to fail. That is not a good business model. The problem with Yahoo was Yahoo. Business models based on limited success are stupid.
You keep getting it wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
It is surprising how many /.ers keep repeating the nonsense about Goole being an Ad agency.
Are ABC, NBC (SKY, ITV and others in the UK) ad agencies? No, of course not, they arent. They are TV companies that support their broadcasting activities by means of advertising, and obtain a healthy profit at times for it, but they do not organize the advertising campaigns of anybody, they just sell slots of time according to demand in order to make money.
Google is a tech company, they study the data, and increasingly the metadata, and the interaction of people with them, arrive to conclussions, and monetize that knowledge.
Advertisements are one way to monetize that knowledge, but there are so many other ways to take advntage of it that it is scary.
A proper advertisement agency will provide a complete package about how to present a given product and will organize a campaign for you. Google by no means does that.
But go on, keep repeating this nonsense, it is a meme that clearly is sticking around here.
Re:The problem is who bought yahoo... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, but they'll actually be looking down from 10,000 feet in their company-owned Gulfstream jets.
You might think those people are incompetent, self-important douches, but by some measures they're doing something right.
Where they went wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably none of you youngsters remember this, but Yahoo! initially didn't do search as much as handmade lists of interesting sites. To make it into their search results your page would be evaluated by a member of their staff. Talk about quality control! In a sense it was an early, massive, blog. I'm not saying that it's a good business model but it was good for the end users. They went away from that model and to spidering the web like all their competitors. Ten years later they're on life support. Coincidence?
Now Get off my lawn!
Re:What went wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh really?
Do you remember the internet around that time?
We had AskJeeves, Astalavista, HotBot, Yahoo, Ilse and a pile of other searchengines. Google was one of the pile.
Later google released gmail. We had millions of online email providers, hotmail was really hot that time with MSN-chat integration and your profile page (taking a throw at MySpace)
Google did bring innovation in searchresults and found a way to neatly advertize. But most of its funtionality was very much already existing. They played the same game as alot of others at that time, but just slightly better.
Every large cooperation at a certain point starts to work profit driven and do get greedy in a sense. I doubt someone sat at Yahoo thinking "ok, this is slipping away", no they thought they were doing the thing generating the most profit.
Alot of older softwarehouses have a product, they (suits) milk it for years to come and just "innovate" as necessary, not beyond that.
Re:What went wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh really?
Do you remember the internet around that time?
Just because there were a bunch of search engines at the time, that doesn't mean that there wasn't a large opportunity on the search space that none one else did to the extend they did: For one, most of the contenders at the time were embedding their search engines in portals. Google did not. Secondly, and most importantly, the great opportunity that no one exploited until Google's time was the ranking of pages for the purpose of searching as opposed to textual indexing (be it with inverted or forward indexes.) The PageRank (tm) algorithm exploited a market opportunity that was there for the taking.
A market opportunity is not something that occurs because there aren't any competitors. It is *that* which is not done or not done well by your competitors, even if they exist by the millions.
Re:You keep getting it wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
They are not ad agencies in the sense of creating ads, no. But the business is run by the advertising side in both cases. That is, if you cross the ads people, you get fired, not them. They decide on the tone of reporting, content of shows, etc. They get approval power over basically everything. If you don't think that's the reality ... well ... go work for any one of them for a time.
Re:You keep getting it wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
It is surprising how many /.ers keep repeating the nonsense about Goole being an Ad agency.
Are ABC, NBC (SKY, ITV and others in the UK) ad agencies?
The state of media being what it is, yes ABC, NBC, FOX, etc are ad agencies. When(if) they start doing journalism again I'll consider them more than that.
Sloppiness, Bad Design, Wussiness (Score:5, Insightful)
Yahoo news stories used to universally take comments from readers. They were actually early with this, but then they cut it off. Fear of lawsuits is all I can think of. Now almost every news outlet on the web lets you comment on the stories. The legal staff and management at Yahoo simply hadn't the balls for even the slightest amount of risk.
They've also become the poster child of bad web design. The mail login goes through changes every month. They're not an improvement. Currently, you load 3 pages of noise filled unread ad droppings before you can actually log in and look at your mail. They used to have an easy to use weather and TV Guide. The were changed from simple, usable HTML pages to automated, advertising filled junk that made them almost unusable. Then they didn't measure the amount of use after the changes and modify accordingly. In fact, I doubt if they pay significant attention to users at all.
And they're just *sloppy.* I don't know how else to describe a company of that size that can't even keep its comic pages updated consistently.
Google, in contrast, has a clean look, usability and no ad droppings randomly scattered on pages.
And they have one more thing. Success.
Re:What went wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you remember the internet around that time?
Do You?
Yahoo was an index, not a search engine. Altavista (not Astalavista, we're not trying to find warez) was the best / most popular actual search engine became the provider of search results to Yahoo as early as 1996 - Yahoo was not in the search engine business they were in the portal / media business.
Altavista was popular because of its minimalist interface, and because their crawler was fast and indexed much more of the web than anyone else had at the time. What Google did was come along and provide the minimalist interface, crawled as much or more of the web but on top of that it gave results what were much much more relevant than Altavista, AskJeeves, etc. There was absolutely a market for a better search engine at the time and Google seized it, which is why they became so dominant so quickly - it was hardly "slightly better" - it was way way better.
Re:Jerry Yang (Score:3, Insightful)
thumb your nose at the evil MS
Either that or recognizing how quickly MS could kill a Silicon Valley company like Yahoo (as they did to GO).
No, I think Yahoo's real Achilles heel can be summed-up in two words: middle management. Well ok, four words: technically underqualified middle management. The low point was when one of these middle managers tried to switch the entire corporate email system to MS Exchange. While that was the lowest of their low points many others continue to be nearly as bad. Bottom-line is that middle managers are rarely held responsible, upper managers are too busy, and everyone is skilled at pretending to be over-committed (which many are) and afraid to do anything about it.