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What Happened to Yahoo

paulgraham.com

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Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#71

Post by kenjackson »

markbao wrote: post #34

> "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-…

Search has always been important to the web. But as it wasn't at all sticky, it didn't seem to have money making value. This is why Google originally tried to do enterprise search. NOBODY got that targeted ads via search was the way to go.

And if Search didn't turn out to be a big money maker via ads, Yahoo would probably still be the biggest web company and Google would probably be a niche company last FAST -- making a profit, but not being the new software power.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#72

Post by chaosmachine »

srslydude wrote: post #38

[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…

"Which is the only company to _promote_ hacking culture to students? Yahoo."

http://code.google.com/soc/

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#73

Post by philwelch »

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 isn't a software company per se--they have a lot of EE's, other engineers, industrial designers, and so forth. These people have different cultures from hackers, by and large. But by and large they seem to demand the most from everyone they hire, including programmers. They don't have the compulsion to fill up on staff as much as they want to have the best people.

It's impossible to tell without working there (and once you work there you probably lose the privilege of speaking openly about this stuff) but it seems Apple is just a generalized, multidisciplinary example of what pg's talking about.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#74

Post by enneff »

plinkplonk wrote: post #49

"Most technology companies eventually get taken over by suits and middle managers." Interesting statement. I suspect this process is well under way at Google these days. But why does this happen? Is it just that once companies grow large enough, you need middle managers, (who then consolidate power and control)? Is there a more nuanced explanation?

"I suspect this process is well under way at Google these days."

What's your basis for this speculation?

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#75

Post by srslydude »

plinkplonk wrote: post #59
srslydude wrote: post #38

[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…

"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?" 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…

re:tone, yes, I'm taking a sensationalist stance because I feel the author takes one too. I'm aware this is detrimental to discussion, but hey, it's more fun this way! :)

re:interpretation of death, sure, let's call it irrelevance. OR let's even call it 'random variable x". The point is that pg asserts the company has been in "x" for 12 years. Which is 60% of the WWW's lifetime. It may be a decline, but I would not call it a spiral. at least of death.

re:research, I agree about orthogonality of research and company. This was addressing pg's point about Yahoo being a "talent-magnet" -- they indeed are a talent magnet in this domain.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#76

Post by statictype »

_delirium wrote: post #37
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #28

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.)

Doesn't Steve Jobs always refer to Apple as a software company? A company that's "passionate about making great software".

Even though they make great hardware, his position seems to be that its the software that delivers the product experience.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#77

Post by mrshoe »

adammichaelc wrote: post #58
mrshoe wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So it's hackerly...

No, it's not. That gets at the very essence of my original comment.

One of the assertions in the article is that a hacker culture is a necessary ingredient for a successful technology company. I see Apple as a counterexample to this argument. And it's a counterexample that shouldn't be ignored. Apple is driven by design (industrial design, product design, graphic design). They think about products, not technology. They often invent new technologies to enable their products, but that's very different from thinking primarily about technology (a mistake, I would argue, that Google is guilty of frequently).

Taking as an example a project like Google Wave, I would even go as far as to say that a strong hacker culture and an obnoxious elitist culture of hiring only the best programmers can be serious detriments to a technology company. YMMV, but, culture-wise, I'd much rather build (and work for) an Apple than a Google.

Edit in reply to your reply: I thought it was any company that needs to have good software. But even so, surely Apple doesn't pay significantly more than Google (a hacker-centric company) and surely they're in roughly the same domain (iOS/Android, iAd, etc.). I think the real problem is in your next sentence: Otherwise you can't attract good programmers to work in a suit-centric culture. That's a big false dichotomy. Sure, suit-centric technology companies will fail. And hacker-centric technology companies sometimes succeed. I think Apple shows that a culture that is neither suit-centirc nor hacker-centric is the best option of all. If many of your YC companies are trying to build great technology companies, they should take that to heart.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#78

Post by mediaman »

PanMan wrote: post #15

I heared that when one of the large investment banks (forgot which one) got a new CEO, the first thing he did was stopping all IT outsourcing projects. He did realize a modern bank is, in fact, a software company, and you shouldn't outsource your core activity.

I believe you're referring to Jamie Dimon, now of JPMorgan Chase, who canceled a $5bn IBM IT outsourcing contract because he believed that technology was a core competency of a modern bank.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#79

Post by [deleted] »

plinkplonk wrote: post #59
srslydude wrote: post #38

[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…

"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?" 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…

[deleted]

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#80

Post by [deleted] »

srslydude wrote: post #75
plinkplonk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?" 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…

re:tone, yes, I'm taking a sensationalist stance because I feel the author takes one too. I'm aware this is detrimental to discussion, but hey, it's more fun this way! :) re:interpretation of death, sure, let's call it irrelevance. OR let's even call it 'random variable x". The point is that pg asserts the company has been in "x" for 12 years. Which is 60% of the WWW's lifetime. It may be a decline, but I would not c…

[deleted]
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