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What Happened to Yahoo

paulgraham.com

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Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#161

Post by dman »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #153
matthew-wegner wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On some level heroku , amazon cloud etc achieve exactly the kind of equality you talk about. On the other hand our ability to create data might outpace moores law and might hence required continued usage of data centers.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#162

Post by baguasquirrel »

pg wrote: post #92
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…

One of the assertions in the article is that a hacker culture is a necessary ingredient for a successful technology company. No it isn't. I said that you either need that or to pay people a lot or to be in an interesting industry where there are no competitors who have hacker cultures. If Apple doesn't have a hacker culture, then it would probably be an example of the latter.

I'm not sure it's that either. All of the Apple folks I know are pretty fanatical about the mantra of design. They are motivated to be good hackers because they have a strong desire to make beautiful products, rather than the other way around.

Although this may not be as nice as a hacker-centric culture (if you are a hacker), it is still leagues better than an utterly non-hacker centric culture, because the devs are respected for what they do at Apple. This seems to be a critical difference necessary for producing great products.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#164

Post by lukifer »

statictype wrote: post #76
_delirium wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Jobs frequently quotes Alan Kay: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#165

Post by jacobolus »

philwelch wrote: post #160
jacobolus wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Worl…

I agree with you that the emphasis changed dramatically from the Apple of before Jobs’ return, which had a (relatively to now) large basic R&D arm, and a vision for the future alternating between wheel-spinning and incoherence. But I don’t think the Apple of today is especially like NeXT either, probably mostly because the markets it aims for are so completely different. For example, the first iMacs and iBooks don’t seem remotely related to the NeXT design aesthetic, and IMO neither do modern iPhones or PowerBooks. Something like the iPod doesn’t seem to me to have anything to do with NeXT, in user base, in problem space, in software style, in product vision, etc.

You’re right that early versions of OS X looked much more like NeXTStep than they did like previous versions of Mac OS (being built on NeXT’s codebase), and still today is in many small details a regression. But as OS X has matured, it has felt ever more like "classic" Mac OS, not less. I think if NeXT had been independently successful and turned NeXTStep into a consumer OS, it would have evolved in a dramatically different direction (though of course that’s counterfactual).

I don’t really know what it was or is like to work inside these companies, but I doubt that the feel of NeXT could be quite like the feel of the modern Apple, if only because modern Apple is so much bigger.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#166

Post by pvg »

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.

As it should be since for the most part, Apple has been conspicuously absent as an internet and web company, especially during the period discussed in the article. I have many reservations about the conclusions and generalizations PG draws, but it seems silly to fault him for not including Apple. He didn't mention General Electric either.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#168

Post by davidw »

A minor stylistic nit: I wouldn't have put 'hosed' in the lead. There are many equally valid words that convey the same meaning without such a colloquial feel to them; in other words, in 10/20 years they won't look as out of place as 'hosed' might.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#169

Post by hussong »

mrshoe wrote: post #77
adammichaelc wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

Maybe product companies should be run by turtlenecks.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#170

Post by flipper »

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.

Digressing for a moment, what about the reverse, i.e., how long would the average HR consultant last as a programmer? They'd have to organize a swap: the programmer hands over their brain, the HR consultant their mendacity.
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