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What Happened to Yahoo

paulgraham.com

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Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#31

Post by mrshoe »

strlen wrote: post #29
mrshoe wrote: post #22

Apple is very conspicuously absent from this article. ...the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people that the big winners have had. Is Apple a big winner, like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook (the other companies he mentions repeatedly)? Bigger. (Check the last 1, 5 or 10 years on Google finance for the GOOG or MSFT comparison. FB is not public, but...) Do they have this…

> I wouldn't say that Apple is dominated by a hacker culture at all. It's a mistake to say that. All the work that went into the LLVM/Clang, low-level development that's done OS X and iOS isn't something that you can do without hackers; neither are the algorithms used by Aperture or even iPhoto.

Oh, there are plenty of great hackers at Apple. That doesn't mean the company has a "hacker-centric culture", though. Does Apple make "a point of hiring programmers even for jobs that would not ordinarily consist of programming, like HR and marketing", like the article mentions about Facebook? No way.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#32

Post by mey »

mrshoe wrote: post #22

Apple is very conspicuously absent from this article. ...the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people that the big winners have had. Is Apple a big winner, like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook (the other companies he mentions repeatedly)? Bigger. (Check the last 1, 5 or 10 years on Google finance for the GOOG or MSFT comparison. FB is not public, but...) Do they have this…

I'd argue that Apple is a hardware design company that knows how to contract things correctly (from Mac era to today). Apple has always been focused on a complete packaged form, from Lisa to the iPad. They demand perfection, secrecy, and obsession from their people. Some of their worst years are because the business talent of Steve Jobs was not at the helm.

How long did their core OS not have protected memory, or pre-emptive multitasking?

Apple still see's their OS as a package with the hardware. I would think this is part of their attachment to iOS (that and the massive markup and market penetration they've had so far).

The iPod gen 1 through gen 4 was not a hacker platform.

" Apple did not develop the iPod software entirely in-house, instead using PortalPlayer's reference platform based on two ARM cores. The platform had rudimentary software running on a commercial microkernel embedded operating system. PortalPlayer had previously been working on an IBM-branded MP3 player with Bluetooth headphones.[4] Apple contracted another company, Pixo, to help design and implement the user interface under the direct supervision of Steve Jobs.[4] As development progressed, Apple continued to refine the software's look and feel. " -- Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.#1986.E2.80.931993:_R... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod

Edit: I could go on longer, for example, OSX coming from BSD and NextStep etc but I'm done. :)

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#33

Post by mrshoe »

pg wrote: post #30
mrshoe wrote: post #22

Apple is very conspicuously absent from this article. ...the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people that the big winners have had. Is Apple a big winner, like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook (the other companies he mentions repeatedly)? Bigger. (Check the last 1, 5 or 10 years on Google finance for the GOOG or MSFT comparison. FB is not public, but...) Do they have this…

I don't know enough about what it's like inside Apple now to say. Certainly from what I've heard there used to be a hackerly culture in the past. I remember reading how mystified and offended Gil Amelio was by it. But I don't know what things are like now. Is there anyone here who can talk about it? Is the atmos hackerly or corporate?

It's neither. It's ship-great-product-y.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#34

Post by markbao »

> "I remember telling David Filo in late 1998 or early 1999 that Yahoo should buy Google, because I and most of the other programmers in the company were using it instead of Yahoo for search. He told me that it wasn't worth worrying about. Search was only 6% of our traffic, and we were growing at 10% a month."

I'm assuming that their other 94% of traffic came from their content/media business, mail, and other portal-related activities. Since search seems to be a large part of the internet now, has their numbers changed today, or have they stayed about the same?

And search was such a small thing back then—did Google set the example for search becoming one of the most important actions on the internet?

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#35

Post by astrange »

jrockway wrote: post #7
evanjacobs wrote: post #5

"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 Search was a good search engine with an ugly and distracting front page. It's actually still better in some ways - I had a friend who was a sysadmin at Inktomi, and his team managed to run the search servers with far fewer people than Google's team. Of course, that leaves out so many details that you can't really make a good comparison.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#36

Post by mixmax »

"in the early days Facebook made a point of hiring programmers even for jobs that would not ordinarily consist of programming, like HR and marketing."

No offense, but hiring programmers for HR seems like a terrible idea. HR people's main capacity is to understand people and relationships, not exactly something programmers are known for being good at.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#37

Post by _delirium »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #28
mrshoe wrote: post #22

Apple is very conspicuously absent from this article. ...the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people that the big winners have had. Is Apple a big winner, like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook (the other companies he mentions repeatedly)? Bigger. (Check the last 1, 5 or 10 years on Google finance for the GOOG or MSFT comparison. FB is not public, but...) Do they have this…

> Apple is very conspicuously absent from this article. The article is about Yahoo and in a round about way the move of internet marketing focus from 90s banner advertising to search marketing in 00s. I didn't find Apple Computers Inc. (as it was) to be missing, indeed I'm kinda at a loss where you think Apple fit in to this article. There are already plenty of articles about Apple.

I think the implication was that Apple is a counterexample--- a company that does things basically the opposite of Google, and is very ambivalent about being a technology company rather than a media company, yet is very successful. (One difference is that Apple seems to be very good at selling media/entertainment/image, whereas Yahoo was never a superb media company.)

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#38

Post by srslydude »

[edit: this thread has some insightful replies by others that are worth reading.]

I'm sorry, this may be PG's backyard, but I've gotta call bullshit. Note: I am not a Yahoo employee or corporate shill.

1. "At Yahoo this death spiral started early."

Apparently this death spiral took TWELVE YEARS (the WWW is 20 years old), and Yahoo is still #1 (or #2) in terms of total properties on the web. How is this a death spiral?

2. "If there was ever a time when Yahoo was a Google-style talent magnet, it was over by the time I got there in 1998."

Are you kidding me? You're implying all the current Yahoo engineers are idiots? Then how come each piece of code they release is revered, lauded and used by everybody?

Speaking of talent: Yahoo got best paper at EVERY data-related conference in 2010. No single lab(Google,MS) or university(Stanford etc) has ever done this. Clearly you can achieve this without talent, pg!

3. "In the software business, you can't afford not to have a hacker-centric culture. Probably the most impressive commitment I've heard to having a hacker-centric culture came from Mark Zuckerberg, when he spoke at Startup School in 2007."

Which company is responsible for inventing the term "Hack Day": Yahoo. Which is the only company to _promote_ hacking culture to students? Yahoo. Yahoo != Hacker-friendly? WTFFF!!! (edit:goog does soc, but it doesnt have engineers travel around the world teaching kids hands-on like yahoo does)

4. Google and Apple are shiny and get all the attention. Yahoo's the internet's underbelly. It's audience may not be SF hipsters, but they exist and there are a lot of them. Just because they're not like you doesn't mean they dont exist. Just because Yahoo doesnt cater to you doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

5. pg's product got hosed after inclusion into Yahoo. This happens. Reading a Yahoo critique from pg is like reading a Google critique from Evan Williams (Blogger), or a Google critique from the Dodgeball guys. It's a biased opinion.

6. It's a miracle Yahoo has survived for so long despite being criticized by the media /market for more than half its lifetime. The only other company that has had it worse was Apple, when they fired Steve Jobs. Yahoo doesnt have a Steve Jobs, and has been managed badly, but the engineering is SO GOOD that it STILL does a good job overall.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#39

Post by tailrecursion »

In 2002, Yahoo! began a serious effort to compete with Google in search by buying Inktomi (plus Altavista and FAST). In what must have been early 2004, I came over with the rest of the Inktomi crew to work on search. The Inktomi people were top notch, Yahoo! seemed earnest about doing what it took to go head to head with Google, and the integration efforts were done really well. While I was there I worked in an island of Inktomi people (plus some from Altavista), and I repeatedly got the impression that Y! people, technical and otherwise, were a little soft, maybe even complacent, relatively speaking.

I do feel Y! did a great job -- and made a great decision -- in integrating its search acquisitions; but those acquisitions threw into sharp relief what Y! really was. It's hard to get into too much trouble when all you're doing is throwing horoscopes onto web pages; but Yahoo! never struck me as being serious about software, and as Paul says, they didn't seem to think that was a problem.

Somewhere in 2005-2006, Y! made an attempt to revamp its search ad services with a large-scale software project called Panama. It was going to do a lot of things, including ad ranking refinements to improve revenue per query, and allowing advertisers to create more complex ad campaigns. This project seemed to undergo huge troubles, and I wonder if it was ever completed in any real sense, because I heard so little about it, and everything I heard suggested disaster.

Honestly I don't know if the fruits of Panama -- such as improved auctions for ads on search result pages, which is a critical thing -- were ever deployed. But a couple years later they made the Microsoft deal. Over the last couple years, select people at Y! have moved on to Google, and many many others are now at Microsoft.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#40

Post by btilly »

strlen wrote: post #12
jrockway wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad programmers wrote a bad search engine, and Yahoo lost all their traffic to the good search engine?

> 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 pro…

More than that, Yahoo's deliberate strategy at the beginning was to not build their own search engine, but just to buy the services of whatever was best out there. At one point that was Alta Vista. Later it was Inktomi. After all search was a well-studied problem, and they thought it was pretty much solved. So why put a lot of energy into building expertise in how to build what they thought would be a commodity.

Then Google demonstrated that search was not a solved problem, search was not a commodity, and it was too late.

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