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What Happened to Yahoo

paulgraham.com

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Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#151

Post by sh1mmer »

321speak wrote: post #149
sh1mmer wrote: post #138

Disclaimer #1: My job is technology evangelist for Yahoo! So refuting this is probably the definition of my job. Disclaimer #2: This is my own completely unsanctioned opinion and does not necessarily represent Yahoo!'s views or opinions. I'm obviously biased here, but I have a great respect for HN and PG so I wanted to talk about this. PG accuses Yahoo! of two things right at the very top of the article and the rest…

My sense from meeting Yahoo devs is that they are ok, in that they have the credentials, but didn't seem very passionate or excited about new tech. Can you bring up some examples where Yahoo is pioneering a new field? (search, media delivery, social etc, what ever Yahoo as a company is really excited and passionate about internally...)

How about Hadoop? Sure Google released the Map/Reduce paper, but it was Yahoo who wrote 90+% of the current industry standard.

What about Node.js? That's pretty en vogue right now. We are currently hiring Node.js engineers and have a number of core contributors in various parts of the company.

YUI and our other front-end work at Yahoo! is world class. People like Crockford are considered leading experts in doing quality front-end web engineering.

Our data centers are also cutting edge, I'm not an expert in this area, but I'm told we are at least on par with Google. Some of the new project are completely cooler-free, the whole building being designed to control heat and power flow.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#152

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#153

Post by InclinedPlane »

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?

Facebook overlooks the fact that lock-in is nearly meaningless on the web, so you can't treat your user base as a given. eBay is ignoring this. Myspace ignored this and they're nearly irrelevant now.

Companies are growing to the multi-billion dollar mark faster than ever. That trend will only continue as technological advances continue. What will happen in the near future as SSDs get better, larger, and cheaper? What will happen as multi-core CPUs continue their progression? As always, single newer machines become capable of replacing multiple older machines. At what point in the future does the equivalent storage, processing, and transactional volume capabilities of an entire datacenter of today fit into a single server room tomorrow? A single rack? A single 1U server? A single VPS instance?

In the not too distance future the ability to host applications like facebook that serve hundreds of millions or even billions of users will be just a click away and cheap enough to fall under the "ramen profitability" umbrella. Giant, billion user apps will be the viral videos of tomorrow. Companies will grow to enormous sizes not in a matter of years or months but in a matter of days, or hours.

What happens when your billion dollar, thousand dev. corporation has serious competition in the form of a 5 person startup?

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#154

Post by pgbovine »

blantonl wrote: post #134
pgbovine wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

engineers/hackers don't usually focus on doing academic research and writing academic papers targeted to top-tier academic conferences. I am in total agreement with this. These days anything targeted towards top-tier conferences typically has a sales-marketing slant wrapped around it.

agreed, well it's because academics have to be good salespeople (i'm not saying that to be demeaning, it's actually a useful skill). professors need to 'sell' their research proposals and visions to funding agencies in order to get multi-million dollar grants. similarly, they need to 'sell' the high-level pitches of their papers to reviewers in ultra-competitive publication venues

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#155

Post by megablast »

mkramlich wrote: post #112
megablast wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People tend to hire people like themselves, who think and talk like they do. So once a few middle managers get in, they start to hire other middle managers. They act like a secret club. They speak the same language, went to the same schools, have the same friends, hang around each other, know each other better than people not in the club. They tend to hire and promote other that are similar to them, more than simply…

There's some truth to what you say but I don't think it's completely for insidious/non-meritocratic reasons. I'm far along enough in my career that I can say that I think what's happening is that it's very very hard to hire somebody through the old "post job, take tons of resumes, filter, interview" method because there's so much crap, and so much noise, and so much risk of getting false positives and false negatives…

I didn't mean to imply it was insidious, just natural. Just as those of your friends who have the same interests as you, you generally see more often than those who do not.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#156

Post by ariels »

There is no single Yahoo (part of the identity problem Yahoo has) and therefore you cannot generalize a culture across Yahoo.

Each division within Yahoo really had its own culture. The search group culture was entirely different from the media (news, sports, etc.) group which was entirely different from the listings (real-estate, etc.) business.

A group like Yahoo Search (prior to its sale) was an entirely tech centric organization. Many of the top engineers from Yahoo Search Yahoo! are now co-founders within top Silicon Valley startups.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#157

Post by rimantas »

inerte wrote: post #124
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?

Companies tend to protect their cash cows. I suspect a Noogler would be fired to suggest they should get out of search and do something else, just like MS (will take) took a long time to release an Office killer. When process and hires are set up to maximize an offer, over the years the company gets fossilized "doing things this way". It happens on every industry. You find some awesome source of revenue, you build up…

Apropriate to mention Apple again: ~50% of Apple revenue comes from products which did not exist three years ago.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#158

Post by nose »

321speak wrote: post #149
sh1mmer wrote: post #138

Disclaimer #1: My job is technology evangelist for Yahoo! So refuting this is probably the definition of my job. Disclaimer #2: This is my own completely unsanctioned opinion and does not necessarily represent Yahoo!'s views or opinions. I'm obviously biased here, but I have a great respect for HN and PG so I wanted to talk about this. PG accuses Yahoo! of two things right at the very top of the article and the rest…

My sense from meeting Yahoo devs is that they are ok, in that they have the credentials, but didn't seem very passionate or excited about new tech. Can you bring up some examples where Yahoo is pioneering a new field? (search, media delivery, social etc, what ever Yahoo as a company is really excited and passionate about internally...)

Here are a few examples:

  http://trafficserver.apache.org/
  http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/
  http://github.com/yahoo
  http://yuilibrary.com
  http://developer.yahoo.com/yap/guide/caja-support.html
  http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
  http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/
  http://developer.yahoo.com/hadoop/

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#159

Post by equark »

csmeder wrote: post #89
mrshoe wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

Very good counter point. However, the few people I know that work at apple are good hackers. So maybe Apple is a cross between Design/Hacker culture. To me it seems optimal to balance the the Hacker culture with Designer culture. Kind of like a yin and yang. What are your thoughts PG? Doesn't design matter? Most YC funded web sites look very good. Isn't a design culture important to have?

Steve Jobs has said as much. He often talks about how apple is "the intersection of technology and the liberal arts."

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#160

Post by philwelch »

jacobolus wrote: post #142
philwelch wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long did their core OS not have protected memory, or pre-emptive multitasking? About until Steve Jobs came back. But the Apple of 1985 to 1997 was not the Apple of today. That Apple is long dead. The Apple of today is basically NeXT, plus the branding and whatever other assets NeXT could salvage from Apple. As far as that company is concerned, their core OS had protected memory and preemptive multitasking since 1…

Let’s make some other statements about as reasonable as yours (absent further supporting explanation): The Mughal India of the 16th–19th centuries was not the India of today. That India is long dead. The India of today is basically the British Raj, plus the branding, mix of religions and whatever else the British could salvage. The Republican party of 1860–1970 was not the Republican party of today. That GOP is long…

In the second Jobs era, Apple's CEO, central technology, and (in the early years) the bulk of their executive team were directly installed from NeXT. Dogs and smoking were banned from the campus, the icon garden was taken down, Apple's entire industrial design was dropped in favor of new directions, and almost all of their software technology was eventually abandoned along with the Newton and the traditional Old World ROM hardware design.

It's certainly true that Apple is now more NeXT than it is what it was. Perhaps it's something different enough from both of those--but it followed NeXT's evolutionary path more than Apple's.

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