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"The worst problem was that they hired bad programmers." Can you provide any specific examples of how bad programmers hurt Yahoo?
"The worst problem was that they hired bad programmers." Can you provide any specific examples of how bad programmers hurt Yahoo?
Bad programmers wrote a bad search engine, and Yahoo lost all their traffic to the good search engine?
Yahoo didn't have their own search technology, until acquisition of Inktomi in 2003 (they used Inktomi to serve their results prior to using Google, whom they used until ~2004).
Correct way to put it is "they didn't hire enough good programmers to build a search engine". A web search engine isn't something bad programmers can build. They acquired a great search engine (the algorithms were, IMO, better than Google's and more immune to gaming, they were a first distributed search engine paving the way for Google's "cluster of commodity hardware" architecture [1]), but it came too late.
[1] See http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.83.... for what I mean by "paved the way". Their mistake was using Solaris on SPARC (appropriate choice in 1996) for a few years too long (Google started on Linux/x86 right away, Inktomi transitioned by the time of Yahoo's acquisition).
I really don't get these Yahoo is dead stories. It's still the biggest site in the world if all it's properties are put together.
I think there's something to be said for focusing on what the market rewards, and clearly the market wasn't rewarding yahoo for having great technology in 1998. Nor did it reward Google for having great enterprise search. You can't fault Jerry and David for not seeing search when the market had clearly supported banners with no basis for search as a viable model yet.
I really don't get these Yahoo is dead stories. It's still the biggest site in the world if all it's properties are put together.
I think Yahoo made the correct decision on both counts. As far as depending on a bogus source of revenue, all new advertising mediums are massively undervalued at first, then massively overvalued, and then only eventually even out. It would be a huge mistake not to plan your entire business model around this cycle. Yahoo did this, and they made literally billions of dollars because of it. Sure, if they had chosen to go into a different sort of business they could have perhaps extended their reign, but it's hard to argue that they made the wrong choice.
As for not having a hacker-centric culture, I think they made the right choice here as well. Every time Yahoo bought a startup, their stock rose more than they paid for the company, meaning every time they acquired their tech through a buyout the execs took home massive paychecks. Whereas every dollar they spent on elite programmers was money out of their pocket.
I think the lesson here, if anything, is that you can make mostly the right decisions and your business can still decline over time.
Incidentally, I heard a great story about one of the Yahoo sales guys. Apparently he bought his own inventory at the end of every month to meet his quota, because the stock he was getting vested was worth more than the 100K or so he was required to fork over each month. (Because he obviously couldn't actually make any sales.)
1. It has no notable engineering foundation;
2. It has no clear vision about what it is and where it's going; and
3. Like Microsoft, it's put a business person in charge, which is the death knell of any tech company. You need someone with a technical foundation or a product person, not a business wonk.