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.'"
Way to compete with MS (Score:2, Funny)
'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
Did anyone else read this as, they hired lousy programmers so they could compete with Microsoft?
Re:Way to compete with MS (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Way to compete with MS (Score:5, Interesting)
I read an article about Yahoo on their tenth anniversary. It bragged about how Yahoo's goal was to always remain profitable and that's why they were able to remain viable, while so many other internet companies went down. At first, I thought that was brilliant in a time when so many other companies were biting the dust because they wasted so much money. But then the reality of what their goals are really struck me - all they cared about was money, and not their customers who were paying them.
In the ecommerce dept, they bragged about having a $3 BILLION dollar annual revenue, but I regularly saw them screw their customers over big time. If a guys account/site couldn't be fixed at level 1 tech support, then they transferred the call up to tier II - standard procedure. But if tier II couldn't fix it, the ticket had to be escalated up to the engineering dept and woe unto them! It usually took 1 - 3 WEEKS to get it fixed!!! To the best of my knowledge, it is still that way. Even if the customers entire website was down, it didn't matter. I heard that they only had 2 or 3 engineers working there to fix thousands of escalated tickets. No wonder it took so long. The longer it took to fix, the more Yahoo would lose money because they made money by getting a percentage of the customer's sales, so if the customer's site was down, both of them lost money. On top of that, they would not even offer an apology, or reimburse the customer for their lost business. Some customers even went out of business because Yahoo took too long to fix a high priority issue. In contrast, one time I had my own site hosted by a local web hosting company selling some stuff, and I verified one morning that my site was down, and it wasn't my computer, internet connection, etc, so I sent in an email to tech support. In 2 minutes, I received an automated response acknowledging my issue and it informed me that some techs were working on the issue. In 15 minutes, I got another email from the techs themselves telling me more details about what went wrong and that they will have it fixed soon. In less than 3 hours, my site was back up and running! If a small web hosting company can do that, then a multi-billion dollar company can do that too, BUT THEY CHOSE NOT TO, so I don't feel sorry for Yahoo. They shot themselves in the foot.
Yahoo was only interested in grabbing more customers and not keeping the ones they had and they made some very stupid mistakes as a result. Like one time they had a web ad for their merchant solutions ecommerce, bragging about how good they were, but when you clicked on the link to see what customers h
Re:Way to compete with MS (Score:4, Funny)
'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
Did anyone else read this as, they hired lousy programmers so they could compete with Microsoft?
I read it as: Yahoo bought a Mary-Kay Pink colored car so that Microsoft wouldn't steal it if they had to park on the street.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
As a lousy programmer and ex-Yahoo employee, I can confirm this.
Re: (Score:2)
'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
Did anyone else read this as, they hired lousy programmers so they could compete with Microsoft?
No. Only you did. In other words, your reading comprehension skills are a sad indictment of our education system.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What went wrong at yahoo: (Score:2)
Simple: They had a marvelous tree of web sites, arranged so you could browse them by interest. I used it constantly. Then they stopped updating that, and finally abandoned it, and became useless. Eventually they used cash to buy things that were useful, like flickr, and so technically now have some merit again, but it is certainly not the usefulness they originally had. Which, I might add, search engines like Google really don't replace at all. Google's listings often do a terrible job of putting the actua
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.
Re:Nothing went wrong at Yahoo (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nothing went wrong at Yahoo (Score:5, Informative)
I was a couple of buildings over from Filo and Yang in (chemistry) grad school back when this weird little program called Mosaic appeared. But it was a toy- you couldn't find information on it. You ended up posting lists of your bookmarks so that other people could find the neat stuff you did. Then we heard about these two guys over in Engineering that were collecting links and indexing them (by hand). It was great- finally a place where you could find literally thousands of organized web links as opposed to our crappy lists of a few dozen.
Yahoo's kind of seen as a pathetic loser these days by the "digital elite" but they had a massive effect on the early web
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I think Webcrawler would disagree that search engines did not exist when Yahoo started.
Furthermore, Yahoo wasn't spidering until they licensed Inktomi in the late 1990s and eventually bought them outright in 2002.
Every little bit of history helps.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, it depends. According to Wikipedia, Mosaic was released in April '93, and Webcrawler went live in April '94. That means there's a full year in when GP's story can take place and still be factually correct.
Again according to Wikipedia, Jerry Yang and David Filo started Yahoo in January '94, so yeah, I think GP's is correct when he said search engines didn't exist when Yahoo began.
Either way, search engines certainly didn't get popular until Altavista came around, and then later Google which truly revol
Re: (Score:2)
This is why I'm still working for the man and Filo and Yang can take Scrooge McDuck baths in hundred dollar bills.
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.
Re: (Score:2)
No, the problem with Yahoo was/is Google. Google serves/served up semi-garbage results very fast, while Yahoo served up very good results fairly slow - and one truism of the net is that the denizens thereof will eat almost anything, so long as it's fast.
Re: (Score:2)
No, the problem with Yahoo was/is Google. Google serves/served up semi-garbage results very fast, while Yahoo served up very good results fairly slow - and one truism of the net is that the denizens thereof will eat almost anything, so long as it's fast.
Look, I was making webpages before Google, before Altavista, before Hotbot. Yahoo was the only game in town. Crawlers were research projects. Back then the total number of interesting websites was very small, so a managed directory approach was viable. As the web grew, it became more dynamic, but Yahoo kept using the same old approach instead of crowdsourcing (the term hadn't yet been invented, but the idea had) ratings. Consequently, the amount of work they had to do kept increasing, where if crowdsourcing
Re: (Score:2)
More likely, they failed to adapt. They kept collecting links and hand-ranking them.
On the other hand, Google did the link collecting automatically, and came up with some formulas to automatically rank them as well. They still ranked some sites by hand afterwards, but it wasn't nearly as involved.
Funny thing is, sites like Digg and Reddit are exactly like what Yahoo used to be, except they use their users to rank instead of an employee.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Search Algorithms (Score:2)
Advanced Search.
The "boring" search box stopped being useful to me ... in 1998. ... you got "Independent Film" plus some weirdly wildcard SEO'ed pages.
I have had a link to Yahoo Advanced search close by on my home jump-pages. Then you just type your phrase in the second line which is "this exact phrase". If you want "Independent Film"
Lately I have found a use for Yahoo as an Anti-Google in the Privacy Wars. I am still just fine with my Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Advanced Search, and a couple of other Yahoo items.
Onl
Re: (Score:2)
I actually like web directories for somethings.
Suppose you are thinking of moving. Or just want to find out about a town.
You could go to the directory and find all sorts of links to that things in that town or about that town.
Now I just Google the town and hope the chamber of commerce site doesn't suck.
Also search doesn't usually find new sites.
If you create a great site on a subject it will be a while before it shows up in the search ratings until other sites like to you and you rise in the rankings.
I stil
Re: (Score:2)
I think the real problem was that at some point, Yahoo decided to de-emphasize their search directory and turn themselves into a portal site, because that was the latest hyped-up trend.
First they started filling search directory results pages with unrelated crap to push their portal concept. Then they got rid of the search directory entirely, and I stopped visiting their site.
Could they have kept the directory working? Maybe. dmoz.org was an attempt to do so, but by that point everyone had come to rely on G
Re: (Score:2)
The problem with the portal concept was the timing. I didn't switch to Google because they had better search results, I switched because portal-type pages took 10-30 second to load with my modem, but Google loaded almost instantly. A few years later this would not have been a problem - the difference between a tenth of a second and a second on a broadband connection is not important - but back on a modem it made browsing (sorry, 'surfing the world wide web') a lot faster.
The new user interface is one o
Re: (Score:2)
. I never could figure out the basis of inclusion - maybe payola or maybe something else but it certainly wasn't *relevance*. That's one difference between Google and Yahoo.
You had to submit your site to them, or they had to discover it. Your site had to have merit to their team of editors (or whatever they were called). I remember being very happy that Yahoo decided to index my site, back in the mid-90's.
On one hand I rather miss Yahoo, and other indexers, which would hand sort through all the crap, and
Excellent Article (Score:2)
Found this to be a brilliantly written piece of work from someone who knows what he's saying.
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:I Remember (Score:5, Insightful)
What universe did you live in? There was a little thing AltaVista in that time period.
Yahoo! *didn't have* their own search-engine (Score:4, Interesting)
What universe did you live in? There was a little thing AltaVista in that time period.
Indeed: as I recall, the `Yahoo! search-engine' *was* AltaVista (with Yahoo! decorations, but a little "powered by AltaVista" footnote at the bottom)--at least at some point; I think there were different back-ends that they used at different points.... Yahoo! may have actually done their own thing for the last few years, but only for the last few years.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That would have been around 2003:
In February 2003, AltaVista was bought by Overture Services, Inc.[10] In July 2003, Overture itself was taken over by Yahoo!.[11]
ref [wikipedia.org]
However it's interesting to go back in time and look at altavista.com [archive.org] and yahoo.com [archive.org] :)
Re: (Score:2)
In the beginning, Yahoo had human editors scouring what little there was of the web and placing links to interesting sites in their heirarchy. This worked when the web was very small. (Yahoo's predecessors were those big thick Internet Yellowpages books.) When this failed to scale, they tried making their own web crawler and search engine. That didn't work out either, so they outsourced their web search to Alta Vista.
The only thing that Yahoo has done well since its beginning is convince people to use them
Re:Yahoo! *didn't have* their own search-engine (Score:5, Informative)
AltaVista wasn't even started as a business. It was a demo for DEC Alpha machines, one of the first big systems built from huge numbers of rackmount machines interconnected by local area networks. Before that, most big data centers were built around mainframes.
AltaVista was originally installed in an old Pacific Telephone building in Palo Alto, a few blocks from DEC's research center. Because the building was built for rows of racks and cable trays, their data center was set up like a phone central office, with aisles of open racks bolted to the floor and cable trays above. At the time (1995) the typical data center had cabinets sitting on raised floors. In many ways, AltaVista set the pattern for the next fifteen years of computing.
Re: (Score:2)
It's OK to be a first mover, as long as you keep moving.
Jerry Yang (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Not taking a $33/share buyout from MS, with Google snapping at your heals? But hey, you got to thumb your nose at the evil MS, right? Of course, it was at your shareholder's and company's expense.
If you believe Microsoft is evil, or even if you just believe that they are a blight on the face of computing, then either you turn down their offer, or admit that you're a corporate whore who will do anything for money.
Re: (Score:2)
or admit that you're a corporate whore who will do anything for money
Yang should have admitted that then, because at first he was just demanding more money, and after Ballmer called his bluff, he tried to woo him back. Like the old joke, we've already established that Yang is a whore, the rest is just haggling over price.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Ah, I remember when that happened. Everyone and their grandma went out and bought Yahoo stock
because they thought it was a sure thing and they would make some easy money. Then when the
deal fell through, they blamed Jerry Yang, rather than taking responsibility for their poor investment
choice.
Re: (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 a
Great memories, though (Score:2, Interesting)
I remember when the WWW was still nascent back in the early/mid 90s. Yahoo was the premier destination for me - the one portal that was always in touch with what I wanted. Then came Excite and others.
Could it also be that the other companies mentioned are largely using Linux, which engenders a sort of "hacker" culture. Yahoo historically has been a BSD-centric company, and the BSD guys I know tend to be far more conservative and less "hackerish". I don't know if the platform has anything to do with it, but
Re: (Score:2)
I know plenty of BSD guys who are very much "hackerish" and consider themselves hackers, they just tend to be a bit more picky about things working properly. Yeah, I remember the late 90s as those dark days when every other app I downloaded wouldn't compile or run because it was written under the assumption that every *nix was just like x86 Linux in every way, and when the devs wouldn't even accept patches to fix their apps because it wasn't a problem for them that did breed a bit of resentment toward the a
Facebook (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
For once, "not fear of changes". Something that user *****HATE***** is changes, Facebook suffer lots of changes, some bad, some good, on the long term is better for everyone. Is exactly the same changes you may expect on a service labeles "BETA", withouth the label. Facebook is running somewhat like how Gmail is running, always testing new changes and enhancements.
Note: I *****HATE***** the latest changes in gmail :-)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
They mean the employee culture, not the user culture.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't really think so, but perhaps he was referring to the tendency of Facebook to disregard boundaries with regard to sensitive information. That would make some sense...
I think more likely he's talking about their corporate culture -- lack of hierarchy, just getting things done, not needing or asking for authorization before you do something cool that you thought of 5 minutes ago, that kind of thing.
Re: (Score:2)
Correct me if I'm wrong but what "hacker" culture does facebook have.
Well, in addition to having oldschool keyboards that still have question marks, Facebook employees have an example of hacker culture in releasing their HipHop PHP runtime [taranfx.com] to the world.
Re:Facebook (Score:4, Informative)
Somehow I can't connect social networking and stupid flash games to "hacker" culture.
Facebook invented Cassandra, as well as Haystack
Here [facebook.com] is their engineering page.
Facebook *has* to be a culture of hackers as they really are pushing the limits of scaling (in the same way that google is)
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: (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, really? [yahoo.com] You, and the folks who modded you up, need to get over your prejudices and get out more.
Yahoo is a lot more than just links - and is the primary reason why Google has added Gmail, iGoogle, News... and all the other things that aren't search.
Media vs Tech (Score:3, Interesting)
If you walked around their offices, it seemed like a software company. The cubicles were full of programmers writing code, product managers thinking about feature lists and ship dates, support people (yes, there were actually support people) telling users to restart their browsers, and so on, just like a software company. So why did they call themselves a media company?
You'd see the same thing at an insurance company, auto company, or any large company that has large in-house development department. And yet, they're not conflicted about if they're a tech company or an insurance company.
Here's a hint on how to decide. How are your revenues generated?
Sell software, hardware, algorithms? Tech company.
Sell advertising? Media company.
Yahoo! Is a media company and so is Google.
It's not rocket science.
Re: (Score:2)
I think you just shifted attention away from the real question:
What area should they focus the most resources on? Should they hire the best developers to start working on the "Y!phone", or should they concentrate on coming up with news content, tweaking and maintain the chat rooms, and to creating contests and gimmicks to sell more ad impressions? It looks like they went mostly in the later direction, so I guess you're right about them being a media company.
Switch to Google (Score:5, Interesting)
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: (Score:3, Funny)
Then again, I used HotDog Stand as a windows colour scheme. I now only see in greyscale.
Re: (Score:2)
In my case it was alltheweb.com which always got me the best results.
But when their system was gutted and replaced with Overture/Yahoo I abandoned it since that change had made it pretty much useless.
Re: (Score:2)
I used Copernic at the time. It was a program which searched over all the existing search engines, sorting the results by relevance. It was very cool then.
Re: (Score:2)
that was because wall street was telling everyone to become an internet portal and crap the homepage with crap to try to get people to stay longer than 10 seconds
Re: (Score:2)
The interface was a huge improvement, but so were there search results.
I used to use Altavista before.
So did I. I remember looking through pages and pages of AltaVista search results hoping to find what I was looking for. After using Google for a while, I rarely had to look past the first page.
I also used to use Yahoo as a directory service when I wasn't looking for something more specific with AltaVista. Google took over that too.
The problem is who bought yahoo... (Score:2, Informative)
Yahoo was bought by Southwestern Bell, a family member of mine worked
for them for over 20 years.
The "suits" for the most part did not understand field operations,
and so the ppl making the big picture decisions did not understand
some of the key things going on in the field.
When the field techs tried to get the info to them they were basically ignored.
Alot of US companies go thru this, its nicknamed the Ivory Tower theory.
Southwestern Bell acts like the ATT of old, and now that ATT bought
all the Bells back up
Re: (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.
Re: (Score:2)
The only thing they're doing right is bleeding money from the people at the bottom and funneling it into the fuel tanks of their Gulfstreams.
Re: (Score:2)
The only thing they're doing right is bleeding money from the people at the bottom and funneling it into the fuel tanks of their Gulfstreams.
It's a consequence capitalism. Anyone who can convince someone that they'll be better off with something than without and sell something (themselves, even) will make more money than someone who can only make things. Long term? There is no long term. Make enough money in the short term and who cares.
Re: (Score:2)
SBC acquired ATT in 2005, and to prove that they did it just for the name, they re-branded themselves as ATT.
What Went Wrong At Yahoo (Score:2)
Hi
In the article "what happened to Yahoo" http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html [paulgraham.com] you said
At the risk of saying the obvious if Yahoo had been looking to please the consumer, and solve a problem that they were having (in regards to finding information on the internet) they could have avoided bogus s
Re: (Score:2)
At the risk of saying the obvious if Yahoo had been looking to please the consumer, and solve a problem that they were having (in regards to finding information on the internet) they could have avoided bogus sources of revenue.
I'd tweak that a bit: they should have taken the bogus revenue, but been wise enough to plan ahead for when it dries up instead of assuming it would continue indefinitely.
If someone wants to pay you $100 for something that's worth $1, by all means take it -- but also understand that
Better service, customer loyalty, and management (Score:4, Informative)
Service
1) when google came out and I first heard of it I thought wow what a silly name.
2) I got past the name and tried it to see how it was different.
3) It was immediately obvious it was better compared to yahoo.
4) I stopped using yahoo and other search engines immediately.
Customer Loyalty
1) I told my friends and family about google (I rarely suggest anything)
2) I've had issues with some things google has done over the years but nothing major enough. (I dont use chrome all that much because I don't see it as a far superior product compared to firefox. At least not in terms of Google vs Yahoo when it first gained popularity)
3) They've built up a certain level of trust that I don't associate with many companies.
Management
1) I wouldn't go as far to say they are charismatic but I would say they have a ideology that appeals to some people that could make a lot of money without the help of google but still decide to work for the company.
2) I've used their service and I'm a loyal customer but the only thing I have to go on for their management is what I can infer from news. But I still think management was a key part to their success.
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:Offtopic - Sig (Score:2)
Offtopic,
I'm getting a Not Found for your sig link.
Re: (Score:2)
Not entirely accurate. I had a website up in 1996 and it worked like this. Yahoo used a faceted browse, similar to ebay's organization. If you wanted your site on yahoo, you'd go to a form on the site and submit your url, what descrition you wanted, and what category it would go under. The "QC" you talk about was just making sure it wasn't spam and was in the correct category.
They didn't select good site and reject bad ones. You could tell this because there were some pretty terrible websites up at the time
what went wrong? The investment bankers came along (Score:2)
i remember the early days of the internet. i remember the days before Internet Explorer when you had to buy a browser at retail and it was something called Internet in a Box.
I remember the days when Yahoo was king of search. it had a cool name, the results were pretty good and for whatever reason it gained mind share from the other 20 or so search engines around at the time. back then everything was on internet time and wall street analysts thought they knew everything and it was right after Yahoo's IPO. Wa
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: (Score:3, Informative)
Currently, you load 3 pages of noise filled unread ad droppings before you can actually log in and look at your mail.
Strange: I just type 'mail.yahoo.com', log in and I'm there.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, you log in once and as long as your browser is up, the next login is faster. Logging in from scratch using slower DSL gets you an empty page. After you start typing, it gives you the next page with a few graphics (deleting your text), and then finally gives you the final graphics laden pages with Yahoo gal or guy who can take 20 seconds to a minute to load depending on connection speed and general internet weather.
The deal is, 3 separate pages aren't *needed* and you can't depend on the fact that every
Re: (Score:2)
There are still parts of Yahoo that take comments. The trouble is, it's not moderated or filtered in any decent way. As flawed as Slashdot's moderation system can be, at least it has one.
I will certainly concede that they suffer from a serious case of what I call being "Deja'd". I started calling it that after Deja News (remember that?) updated their web site with bells and whistles, essentially destroying the utility for me.
The saving grace of Yahoo (and why I still use it) is that they don't kill off th
Re: (Score:2)
Minor correction. There are still parts of Yahoo that take recently have begun to take comments. I've noticed the return and it's fairly recent.
"The trouble is, it's not moderated or filtered in any decent way."
Actually, that's what I *liked* about it. As vile, stupid and depressing as all those comments were, they were an honest reflection of homo computeris, not some filtered, sanitized, disney-fied, fluffy-bunny collection of happy-talk.
yahoo mail (Score:4, Interesting)
Yahoo mail is an example of doing it wrong. No offense, but when my small team at a university can come up with better spam defenses than yahoo has in our spare time, yahoo has a problem.
So what actually went wrong? (Score:2)
So Yahoo turned out not to be as big as it could have been. So what? A lot of people made money, regardless. The only ones who got didn't were wanks who didn't sell when the selling was good. Sure, PG's pissed^Wsaddened because it didn't turn into the GOOG, but he sort of had a vested interest in that happening, didn't he? Pull the mote out of your own investor's eye, Paul. Really, it's all about the money and most of the people who mattered did just fine by that measure, didn't they?
Re:What went wrong? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, Google was a good, but by no means unique idea. Had they been swallowed, one of their parallels would have filled the void.
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.
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: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:What went wrong? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm an honest to god Yahoo! employee, so the coward goes without saying ...
Yahoo! does have a ton of good ideas, and over the years, has learned to snap up better and better people.
The problem that Yahoo! has had, and still has today, is that it doesn't know what it wants to be. And, as a result, does about a thousand different things simultaneously. Completely half-assed. They grab a certain idea or market, latch onto it, investing and innovating ... then suddenly, they stop thinking it is a priority, and they stop focusing on it. Low and behold, another company comes along, many of them sporting ex-Yahoo! employees or students that Yahoo! rejected, doing the exact same thing that Yahoo! is or was doing, only better or tweaking it, just a tad. It becomes a success, because its their sole focus, while the Yahoo! product falls even more by the wayside.
That is Yahoo! ... they half-ass everything they create, because some other new thing comes along and captures their interest. It makes Yahoo! a clusterfuck of products and services, technology and media; where one portion of a product works as intended but another interlocking piece is a huge pile. If you question that sentiment, look at their homepage. Host a site on Yahoo!. Use a paid product.
Yahoo! is a great way to point your parents, maybe your grandparents. Yahoo! has every opportunity to be a great company, even today. They just need to finish one product at a time, focus on one segment of the market per department, and honestly, honestly after all these years ... decide what kind of company they want to be.
I doubt it will ever happen without some change in the leadership of the company. The board of directors ... all old people, all business-focused, all seemingly lacking the spark of ingenuity. They have aged, they're old people who think they're hip, but really they're just unwilling to take risks or attempt the new. It shows in everything they do and every product they touch. I have hope for Bartz, she seems to have a good head on her shoulders ... but with Yang there, waiting in the shadows, still pulling the strings, Yahoo! seems doomed to fail.
Re:What went wrong? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What went wrong? (Score:4, Interesting)
So, when Google came along, people climbed onto the roof of Yahoo headquarters and waited for the government to bail them out?
But seriously... the problem for Yahoo, and a lot of other companies, is/was as stated in the summary: They don't know if they're technology companies or media companies. Yahoo, Google, etc, are basically ad agencies which use their free services to honeypot people into their advertising ecosystem. I think Yahoo knew it was a media company when people thought they were a technology company, but didn't realize people thought they were a tech company. Google seems to be playing the "oh, we're just an innocent tech company making cool innovations n' stuff" game better, and minimized the impact of their ads.
Consequently, Google has become an advertising and content behemoth while people are still going on and on about how cool their "products" are. It's fucking 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: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.
Re: (Score:2)
Media companies != journalists.
Media companies include publishing companies (books, newspapers, magazines, etc.), broadcasting companies (radio, TV, etc.), production companies (film, music, theater, etc.). Just because they may have news shows, or have publications that purportedly contains facts, does not automatically mean the company does nothing but journalism.
Re: (Score:2)
They are an ad agency because of revenue, not because of what they do. Were it not for ads, they would not be a profitable company and they would not be able to do as much as they do because they would have no money.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
There were things done wrong in New Orleans before Katrina, like not having the flood walls up properly.
Similarly, Yahoo didn't prepare for a competitor to make a better search engine. Any business has to imagine that they will have a competitor.
They were both fat and happy and ignored any doom-saying.
Re: (Score:2)
Larry Page and Sergey Brin must not have looked at it that way. They could see the answer, they had studied the problem of internet search and had found the solution. While Eric Schmidt knew how to monetize it. But your right it is easy to say with hind site look at the mistakes they made. They would have looked at the problem of Google being better. Looked at how, if they did the same thing they would
Re: (Score:2)
To say what "went wrong" is like asking what went wrong in New Orleans when Katrina happened. Certainly with hindsight you can point out all the mistakes. Certainly you could say: "if we'd known..."
Except, of course, they did know.
10 months before Katrina, I was part of a geography competition (multiple choice). One question was: "Which of the following disasters which, if occurred, would be considered so damaging that the Red Cross refuses to have a permanent branch prepared for it?" The answer was a hurricane hitting St Louis (the other options were either really unlikely, or ones where the Red Cross did have a permanent branch associated with it.
When I went home that day, 10 months before Katrina,
Re: (Score:2)
If you'll RTFA you'll see that Yahoo could have been the Google, but they fucked up.
Re: (Score:2)
Disagree; Graham has some useful insights if you bother to RTFA.
There's no insights or understanding in saying "Google happened". Understanding what was going on inside Yahoo! and Google at this time does provide useful insights.
My only fault for Graham's analysis of Yahoo!'s downfall is he fails to mention how poorly Yahoo treated end users of their services, and the end users of services that were acquired by Yahoo! I think this figures into it as well.
It's not just that Yahoo! had poor strategy and did
Re: (Score:2)
Re:From what I gather... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:What's wrong (Score:4, Funny)
Are you trying to say that the reason Yahoo hasn't been more successful is that their employees, led astray by the bad educational system, are lousy at math and this affects Yahoo's performance?
Or are you just replying to the wrong story?