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What Happened to Yahoo

paulgraham.com

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Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#181

Post by gaius »

philwelch wrote: post #100
kvs wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privacy, perhaps.

Privacy and social networking are naturally opposing ideas--social networking is all about sharing information with people and privacy is all about keeping information from people. That's like saying Google ("organize the world's information") overlooked the importance of disorganization or ignorance. It won't be privacy at all that Facebook overlooks, it'll be something completely orthogonal to that axis. It is, how…

That's certainly what Facebook believes. What it doesn't really understand (possibly because its people have gone straight there from college and continued in the same atmosphere) is that normal people want a certain amount of separation between their networks, e.g. work/social/personal.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#182

Post by patrickk »

IdeaHamster wrote: post #103
pg wrote: post #30

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 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.

It's very corporate where I work (not in Cupertino, so no surprise). But everyone I've come across works very hard, not just engineers. And I couldn't agree more about no-one having any time, many people bring their MacBooks home and continue sending emails late into the evening (GMT) to people in HQ in Cupertino (who are eight hours behind).

EDIT: Going on the Apple jobs listing for Cupertino, there is plenty of openings for engineers.

http://jobs.apple.com/index.ajs?BID=1&method=mExternal.s...

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#183

Post by cookiecaper »

MartinCron wrote: post #111
mixmax wrote: post #36

"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.

I've noticed this pervasive bias that if a person is good at programming, they must be terrible at anything and everything else. Perhaps this is a hacker-culture reaction to that kind of thinking?

In the specific case of HR, I think most people assume programmers would hate it because you're going from such an engaging and creative field (programming) to something that is totally brain-dead (filling out forms, reciting orientation spiels every few weeks, looking up answers about insurance and forwarding them on).

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#184

Post by robk »

elblanco wrote: post #125
aero142 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has many core competencies other than software, including hardware design, marketing, and retail. But the common theme I see between them is that they refuse to do things the way everyone else does, and that they hire the best and brightest to work on their problems. Also, they never accept that something can't be done. To me, this sounds very hackerly, just applied to different domains.

Another core competency that Apple has, one that neither Yahoo or Google seem to be able to figure out, is the ability to create, penetrate and dominate new markets. For all the various products Google creates, it's still essentially an advertising company using search as its publishing media in terms of what makes them money. Very pitifully few of Google's projects have either created new markets they can dominate,…

> Gmail, Maps and Android

Those are very big exceptions.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#185

Post by kvs »

philwelch wrote: post #100
kvs wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privacy, perhaps.

Privacy and social networking are naturally opposing ideas--social networking is all about sharing information with people and privacy is all about keeping information from people. That's like saying Google ("organize the world's information") overlooked the importance of disorganization or ignorance. It won't be privacy at all that Facebook overlooks, it'll be something completely orthogonal to that axis. It is, how…

Agreed that privacy and social networks are opposing ideas. But, they are opposing ideas only because how Facebook defines a user's "social network." The entire world is not my "social network." So, IMHO, addressing privacy may need a change in that thinking/definition of what a social network is.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#186

Post by ivenkys »

mediaman wrote: post #78
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.

Yes - he did cancel the Billion Dollar contract but not because I.T suddenly became a core competency. Non-front office facing I.T is being pushed to cheaper locations - primarily to Scotland and Southampton in the UK and is not considered a Core Competency , its outsourcing in a different form , its called IN-Sourcing.

The primary reason for the cancellation of the contract was the sheer amount of beauracracy IBM imposed. Their modus-operandi was - pick up staff who were working in "non-critical" areas and make them report to IBM managers. So now all-of a sudden if i need to get something from our DBA i can't walk upto him and ask him , i need to raise a request in a god-awful system which goes to his manager who would be sitting in a remote location in a different time-zone "managing" the work-load of the DBA who sits 5 feet away from me. In the majority of the cases for access to sysadmins and DBA's who were an integral part of your team before you now had to go through this route.

I will leave the readers to draw their own conclusions to this marvellous scheme.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#187

Post by forgottenpaswrd »

philwelch wrote: post #100
kvs wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privacy, perhaps.

Privacy and social networking are naturally opposing ideas--social networking is all about sharing information with people and privacy is all about keeping information from people. That's like saying Google ("organize the world's information") overlooked the importance of disorganization or ignorance. It won't be privacy at all that Facebook overlooks, it'll be something completely orthogonal to that axis. It is, how…

"Privacy and social networking are naturally opposing ideas"

No is not. Privacy is about managing social networking, the ability to connect to those I want as I want,not someone else telling me how should I do that.

As you get more social, you get more people telling you private things.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#188

Post by jacobolus »

philwelch wrote: post #174
jacobolus wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A lot of good thoughts, but... But as OS X has matured, it has felt ever more like "classic" Mac OS, not less. Past the transition from public beta to release and maybe a couple small points after that, I don't see how this is true at all, and I've extensively used both. What similarities do you notice?

Mostly in the little details, and the overall emotional feeling. Examples:

(It’s not a change since OS X 10.0, but....) Right from the beginning having the menu bar at the top was better than the NeXT per-window menu bars (there were legal reasons for the NeXTStep behavior, sure, but a menu at the top feels so Mac-ish to me, that that difference alone is huge). Much of the conventions for menu organization/structure and so on (and definitely conventions for keyboard shortcuts, for the overall keyboard layout, &c. &c.) is much more Mac-alike than NeXT-alike.

Hardware finally caught up with the software (and the software was optimized better for performance), so that the interface is as “snappy” as OS 9 used to be on then-current hardware. (Early OS X felt terribly sluggish by comparison.)

The mouse acceleration curve reverted to something much more like the classic Mac version (in 10.3 maybe?).

The menus at some point (10.1? 10.2?) returned to the proper behavior of allowing diagonal selection. The alternative is a fundamentally broken interface, and every time I use an operating system that does it wrong I want to stab the guy responsible.

Finally in 10.4, the corners of the screen properly activated the Apple/Spotlight menus (taking advantage of “Fitt’s Law”).

Drag & drop support improved and was properly widely adopted.

AppleScript support by first-party apps got much better.

Dialog boxes got better writing, including somewhat more consistent use of verb buttons.

Did ⌘. (command-period) work everywhere (anywhere?) for cancel in dialogs in early versions of OS X? I don’t remember.

OS X print dialogs still aren’t my favorite, but they’ve improved relative to 10.0 print dialogs, adopting some of the feel of earlier dialogs.

Save dialogs improved a lot since 10.0. I don’t think ⌘D properly went to the desktop in early OS X versions, but I’m not positive about that.

Places where (in NeXT tradition) early OS X used “inspectors”, for instance in the Get Info window, later OS X reverted to the better "classic" Mac OS behavior. (This happened in various first-party apps too, but I’m not thinking of examples off-hand; it’s been a while).

NeXT-ish UI elements like drawers have been gradually phased out, in favor of UI elements which seem more spiritually Mac-ish. Oh, and remember early OS X Cocoa tab view widgets? Wow, were those dumb. Little wonder they’re pretty much gone.

I think support for Mac file aliases was sorta crappy in early OS X versions, but I don’t remember the details.

Cocoa applications started properly dealing with references to files rather than to path locations, for things like re-opening saved files, etc. etc.; early versions of OS X were filled with apps which would behave improperly when a user moved a file.

Exposé feels much more like a culturally Mac-like feature than the use of the Dock, etc. Though Spaces seems more NeXT-ish to me (I don’t remember if NeXTStep had multiple desktops... did it?).

The appearance of OS chrome tended back towards the simplicity of classic Mac OS (obviously not to the precise appearance, but to the feel), with every OS version further away from pinstripes, distracting transparency, slow unnecessarily flashy animations, etc. And not only the overall window ornamentation. Take a look at the folder icons, for example, which look like OS 7.5 icons (I always hated the ones from OS 8–9).

The Finder never regained its spatial-ity (as John Siracusa periodically laments), but it got much better at remembering window state in each version from 10.0 to 10.3.

Disks get properly mounted on the desktop by default (I don’t remember precisely the history of this, but I believe the default was not to show them on the desktop at some point; maybe I’m just confusing early OS X with Windows here).

The Finder at some point (10.4? 10.5?) finally allowed icons to be spaced closer together as in "classic" Mac OS.

The Finder got back color labels in 10.3, an OS 7 feature, which I believe were missing altogether from 10.0–10.2.

Finder keyboard and mouse selection behavior, especially in list mode, improved dramatically from 10.0 to 10.4. In general, the mouse and keyboard behavior of list widgets – rows, disclosure triangles, heading sorting and column resizing, etc. – improved quite a bit.

* * *

I’m sure there are dozens of other such things (if you read through Siracusa reviews and John Gruber’s notes about each OS version I’m sure you’ll find a bundle), but listing more here doesn’t accomplish much. I’m not trying to argue that "classic" Mac OS feels the same as the current OS X does, or that OS X doesn’t also include many very NeXT-feely features like the Finder column view, &c. I do think though that OS X is somewhere between a NeXTStep/Mac hybrid and its own thing altogether, both in specific features and in less tangible “how it feels” aspects.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#189

Post by netcan »

"In the software business, you can't afford not to have a hacker-centric culture."

I think you have to tread carefully in an area like this if you are a programmer. Many opportunities to to confirm a bias.

First, the world is not composed of productive hackers and politicians. In a media company, for example, there are writers, producers, actors, etc. Some of them brilliant. A good strategy for a media company could be to have the best of these.

Second, it's not always obvious what business you are in. I think this is especially for startups because they don't have a big version of themselves to look at. If you are a budding fast food chain, you know what business you are in and you've got examples. Yahoo didn't.

Not all internet companies turned out to be technology companies. Not all such companies in the future will either.

I'm sceptical that Yahoo was ever a great media company either.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#190

Post by forgottenpaswrd »

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?

Steve Blanck talk about this topic:

http://steveblank.com/2009/10/01/durant-versus-sloan-part-1/

Basically a business get specialized in doing something, managers are the best organizing stable stuff, and making money(milking the cash cow). But over time the business change and this people don't like change.

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