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What Happened to Yahoo

paulgraham.com

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Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#101

Post by chopsueyar »

pg wrote: post #47
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…

I never implied all the Yahoo engineers are idiots. In fact I explicitly said the opposite: that the quality was uneven. Uneven means some good, some bad. Also, Viaweb didn't get hosed after being bought by Yahoo. It prospered enormously. I don't bear them any ill will.

Actually, I have always admired Yahoo Store for the fact that it was/is a solid stream of predictable revenue for Yahoo.

What other Yahoo web properties exhibit this?

I was disappointed you didn't mention Mark Cuban (Yahoo acquired his company, Broadcast.com, for $5.9 billion in Yahoo stock in '99).

Fairly expensive domain redirect.

Side note: I have many memories of creating RTML templates, while coveting Trevor Blackwell's DIY segway (the 2nd version).

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#102

Post by lazyjeff »

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…

Just a correction to your point #2: Yahoo won the best paper awards in 2009 at SIGMOD, CIKM, SIGIR, KDD, WSDM, etc. which are indeed the best data conferences. http://labs.yahoo.com/news/311

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#103

Post by IdeaHamster »

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 a very hackerly culture (in some ways still living off the inheritance of Woz), but you won't ever hear about that for two reasons:

1. Secrecy is part of the culture.

2. Engineers work hard at Apple, and many teams are surprisingly small. There are no 20% projects at Apple because nobody has the time.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#104

Post by sesqu »

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 think this is it. As you grow, you need something like n/c management, where n is the production workforce and c is maybe 3. That's not too bad of itself, but it comes with a command chain somewhere between log c and c.

Everything slows down, gets miscommunicated and politicked, and divergent goals appear. The company is no longer about the product, it's about managing the process that produces product.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#105

Post by mkramlich »

matthew-wegner wrote: post #60
gojomo wrote: post #24

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).

What is Rich Facebook going to overlook?

It could have been Diaspora but the Diaspora team made such a big public splash and have so many eyeballs now I'm not so sure. Surely somebody at the top of Facebook has got to be looking at that Kickstarter pledge level of $200k and thinking, "Uh, Mark? We have to talk..."

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#106

Post by pgbovine »

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…

Re: 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!

engineers/hackers don't usually focus on doing academic research and writing academic papers targeted to top-tier academic conferences. Yahoo Research is certainly a leader in the academic world, but that might not translate directly to the quality of Yahoo developers.

conversely, take hot start-up X of the moment who is known for having awesome 1337 hackers. how many 'best paper awards' have they probably won in top-tier conferences? probably ZERO, since they're not focused on doing academic research.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#107

Post by robryan »

WiseWeasel wrote: post #42
mrshoe wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seems like a strange criterion. Would programmers hired to do HR be fulfilled in their jobs? Would they last very long? How does that even work? Do you slip a javascript requirement in the HR position posting? It just seems like you might be missing out on some great HR talent with such an arbitrary requirement.

It depends if you have 1 HR person or something like 10,20+. If it is a large department, having someone from a programming background that is looking for a change could be a big asset if the HR department is primarily dealing with programmers.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#108

Post by dman »

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…

Some companies with hackerly culture - eg Xerox, Sun , Microsoft seem to enter this phase where a lot of cutting edge research and exciting hacking happens but doesnt translate into revenue or customer appreciation. Apple particularly seems to have avoided this problem phenomenally and sometimes I get the feeling that google is susceptible to it. Any speculation into why this might happen ?

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#109

Post by mingdingo »

mkramlich wrote: post #105
matthew-wegner wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is Rich Facebook going to overlook?

It could have been Diaspora but the Diaspora team made such a big public splash and have so many eyeballs now I'm not so sure. Surely somebody at the top of Facebook has got to be looking at that Kickstarter pledge level of $200k and thinking, "Uh, Mark? We have to talk..."

I really don't think Diaspora was ever on their radar. They'll have far more credible threats in the future.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#110

Post by mkramlich »

plinkplonk wrote: post #90
enneff wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I suspect this process is well under way at Google these days." What's your basis for this speculation?

""I suspect this process is well under way at Google these days." What's your basis for this speculation?" Conversations with friends who work there mostly. One of the advantages of being older is that you know people in most companies who talk to you off the record over beer, sometimes in very "high" positions.

I had a similar realization this year. For the first time I realized I knew people who currently work at, or very recently just worked at, all the big software companies: Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook. It may be partly helped by age, but also perhaps if you've ever worked at a large company with a ton of engineers, then leave, and those seeds scatter, eventually at least one ends up taking root at each of the big shops.
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