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What Happened to Yahoo

paulgraham.com

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Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#231

Post by HilbertSpace »

Sorry, PG, but I believe your post is an example of "dancing 'round and 'round and suppose while the secret sits in the middle and knows".

The most important thing is, the CEO very much needs to know nearly everything important for his company. For a company heavily involved in software, the CEO needs to understand software in general and the software of his company in particular.

In a startup, he needs to be able to understand all the software, in detail, from the 'architecture' down to line by line. So, for this he needs to have enough knowledge of computing to understand, evaluate, and construct the architecture and have good knowledge of all the crucial 'software tools'. So, if the software is in C++ and Apache, then the CEO needs to understand these two. Windows? He needs to understand some or all of .NET, the CLR, C#, Visual Basic .NET, ADO.NET, ASP.NET, etc.

Now we come to a curious point: For the CEO to acquire that knowledge takes more of his time than writing the code, given the knowledge. So, really, once the CEO has learned to write the code, he can, for less than the time investment in learning the tools, just go ahead and write the code. He should.

Since the CEO wrote the code, maybe that makes his company a 'hacker culture'? I hope not: There are things more important than ASP.NET, etc. While knowing ASP.NET might be necessary, it is not sufficient. Just because the CEO drives his car does not make him a chauffeur. Instead, the software is just part of his job.

Next, my experience is that the best software developers and, in particular, the ones best at the most technical details of software, and the best at software 'architecture' are not 'hackers' and are not even 'computer scientists' but are mathematicians who took out a few afternoons to understand, say, AVL trees, extensible hashing, Cartesian trees, minimum spanning trees, DeRemer's LALR parsing, and monotone locking protocols but also understand dynamic programming, linear programming on networks, Lagrangian relaxation and non-linear duality, Poisson and Markov processes, and martingales. Sorry 'bout that!

With that technical knowledge and work, he has to pay close attention to the product, customers, revenue, hiring, etc.

Not so strange.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#232

Post by StuffMaster »

ivenkys wrote: post #186
mediaman wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 im…

I conclude that the marvelous scheme was, in fact, slightly non-marvelous.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#233

Post by bioskope »

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…

Yet that seems to produce much better software than Google or Microsoft

Not really. Please do not confuse Apple's successful products with anything else. Microsoft still delivers on software products in a way (admittedly a hardware company)Apple never could. Oh and as for comparisons with Google, thats even more ludicrous.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#234

Post by jimbokun »

philwelch wrote: post #81
mey wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that Apple is a hardware design company that knows how to contract things correctly (from Mac era to today). Apple has always been focused on a complete packaged form, from Lisa to the iPad. They demand perfection, secrecy, and obsession from their people. Some of their worst years are because the business talent of Steve Jobs was not at the helm. How long did their core OS not have protected memory, or pre…

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…

"The Apple of today is basically NeXT, plus the branding and whatever other assets NeXT could salvage from Apple."

Basically, they merged the branch back into the trunk.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#236

Post by ntoshev »

ivenkys wrote: post #186
mediaman wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 im…

Are there hedge funds or investment banks who treat quants/software engineers equally to the traders?

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#237

Post by [deleted] »

akadruid wrote: post #229
robk wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gmail, Maps and Android Those are very big exceptions.

The thing that those 3 have something in common with their search engine and Adwords; they all inspired the same initial reaction: "Someone's finally fixed what's wrong with incumbant market players - this is a game changer". Do you remember what it was like in the days when spammed to death AltaVista, "2MB inbox" Hotmail, static image Multimap, clunky WinMobile and popups/animated gif banners were the kings? (Androi…

[deleted]

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#238

Post by davidu »

bambax wrote: post #178
sh1mmer wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 qual…

Yahoo Search API (whatever its real name is... BOSS or something?) is also fantastic and much superior to Google's (which isn't even really a search api).

Agreed, it's awesome. Yahoo should be focusing resources on it.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#239

Post by jbooth »

StuffMaster wrote: post #232
ivenkys wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 im…

I conclude that the marvelous scheme was, in fact, slightly non-marvelous.

Yeah, but it probably worked out pretty well for IBM, and lazy/mediocre managers could pretty easily abdicate responsibility for things while not getting fired for buying IBM.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#240

Post by MartinCron »

sh1mmer wrote: post #151
321speak wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 qual…

I was just commenting to a friend of mine recently how Yahoo is doing all sorts of cool stuff but doesn't seem to get any credit or credibility out of it.
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