51–60 of 282 posts
Rich Yahoo in 1999 overlooked the value of search. Rich Google in 2004 overlooked the value of social networking (both their in-house hit Orkut and outside services).
And what will Facebook overlook? Maybe location? Was Facebook's failed acquisition of Foursquare like Yahoo's non acquisition of Google?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.)
Check, but it's quite far off from being Yahoo and IMO wouldn't add to this article.
"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.
No offense meant to the wonderful HR people who are no doubt out there, but from my experience HR people are good with: * Processes, procedures and forms * 401K, health insurance and other benefit programs * Buying salary surveys * Finding template bonus programs, performance evaluation programs and hire-a-friend programs. Adjusting them a bit to fit current organization. * Employment and immigration laws I've never…
the point remains the same though. I don't think hackers would be very good at processes, procedures and forms.
Hackers create, this is administration.
"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.
If most (all) of your early employees are hackers, how does it not make sense to hire a hacker to manage HR?
"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.
If most (all) of your early employees are hackers, how does it not make sense to hire a hacker to manage HR?
Not to be offensive, but I think a little bit of respect for other lines of work would be a good thing here.
[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…
I do remember being in the snack room at Brickhouse and seeing two posters along the lines of "watch your competitors." One was Google and the other was Microsoft. I thought those posters were misguided because nothing that I admired about Yahoo included anything that Microsoft and Google did well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
[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…
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?"
By this reasoning MS still has the best OS (and OS engineers) in the world and everything is fine and dandy at MS. They still have 90 % of OS marketshare and Simon Peyton Jones works at MS Research and he works on Haskell and writes awesome papers. How could Microsoft be "dead" as PG claims in another essay ?
The key to this puzzle is that PG uses "death" in a figurative, not literal sense, to mean irrelevance, especially a fade to irrelevance from a previously dominant, direction setting, position not complete physical extinction.
If you prefer, read it as "irrelevance spiral" and you would at least be reacting to what he intended to say vs what you understood by some overly literal reading. "At Yahoo this irrelevance spiral started early" can still be rebutted, but it needs a serious argument to do so.
As he said in his "Microsoft is dead" essay.
"I already know what the reaction to this essay will be. Half the readers will say that Microsoft is still an enormously profitable company, and that I should be more careful about drawing conclusions based on what a few people think in our insular little "Web 2.0" bubble. The other half, the younger half, will complain that this is old news."
Replace Microsoft with Yahoo and this is what you are saying. MS has great market share, lots of smart researchers and many conferences for programmers using its technology and so on. All that doesn't avoid the fact that MS is a shadow of what it used to be in the nineties in terms of technological dominance.
Some of your other points have some merit (but their impact is lessened by your tone imho).
I am all for strong debate and argument (it enriches us all) and PG shouldn't be allowed to get away with sloppy thinking, but you have to show that the thinking is sloppy. And the first step in rebutting an argument is to understand what was really said.
As for whether Yahoo is really hacker friendly, the best way to find this out is to talk to some hackers who work (or have worked) at Yahoo. I am sure there are many people om HN who have worked/did work there. (strlen for example)
From his comment
"Much of the knowledge did diffuse to rest of the organization and it's important to note that along side the "dot-com-wannabe-millionaire-vesting-in-peace" crowd the essay describes, there was plenty of genuine technical talent (anyone who has worked there can attest to presence and influence of hackers).
Unfortunately, for many reasons, that talent has slowly bled out. There was also a great amount of friction between Search and rest of the organization e.g., resistance (by Search engineers) to dog-fooding of what was often inferior technology. Search was, however, able to maintain a different platform, remaining on Linux, with their own platform/software stack, but were some "wtf" moments like porting and forcing the adoption of a custom user space locking library from FreeBSD when Linux already had futex (on the other hand, the fact there was a custom locking library built in a "media company" does say something).
The other key mistake made is that they would position bright, capable new hires in areas that weren't directly correlated to revenue and treated as cost centers."
This sounds like a company making mistakes with respect to technology.
(EDIT: See also tailrecursion's comment on his experience when he cae to Yahoo from Inktomi http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1596797)
(These are just anecdotes and not made to argue a point)I have friends on the Yahoo search team and from what they tell me, they did get crushed in terms of search quality by Google and though they caught up later (though not completely), they could never recover the lost ground in marketshare.
I know someone who argued at an internal "strategy conference" that Yahoo needed to close the technology gap with Google or they would lose Search to Google and was completely ignored (He is still at Yahoo btw, though he switched to being a full time manager as a matter of survival).
Rich Yahoo in 1999 overlooked the value of search. Rich Google in 2004 overlooked the value of social networking (both their in-house hit Orkut and outside services).