What Happened to Yahoo

From Quora: http://www.quora.com/How-valid-are-the-reasons-for-Yahoo-pro...

The main point of Graham's article is that Yahoo! didn't have a hacker-centric culture. If there was a time when that was true, it must have been before I joined.

A company without a hacker-centric culture doesn't encourage the kind of risk-taking and experimentation I saw when I was at Yahoo! Search. As an engineer, I had direct input into product features at every level, from ideation to design to implementation to launch. If I had a crazy idea, I was encouraged not just to tell people about it (up to and including executives), but to implement it and see if it tested well with users. I was able to add my own personal touch to parts of the product (sometimes big parts) without needing to ask permission or wade through excessive red tape.

This may not sound impressive to someone who's used to the way things work at startups or small companies. But this was at one of the largest Internet companies in the world, on one of the most visited websites in the world. For Yahoo! to give me and other engineers the kind of freedom and power we had is not normal for a company or a product that operates at this scale.

> Disclaimer #1: My job is technology evangelist for Yahoo! So refuting this is probably the definition of my job.

Yes, as a "Yahoo Evangelist", you are probably close to 100% biased.

> We didn't win the big prize, but we also aren't AOL, Lycos or Ask.com either. Just because we didn't become Google doesn't mean Yahoo! has failed.

Here's the Signature yahoo denial of reality syndrome. It's quiet similar to the surreal discussions you can casually have with YSearch people telling you that Google Search is an inferior product (or ymail beats gmail, or 360 will own facebook, ..). Basically trying to convince themselves rather than anyone else.

Listen, this is just like alcoholism, if you can't admit that you have a problem, you will not go anywhere. Yahoo has been steadily losing on most fronts for more than 5 years now and it is currently in the mist of a huge identity crisis. Multiple metrics can attest an AOLization process is going on! You're right by the way, Yahoo has not failed yet, neither did AOL, they're still around, just totally irrelevant ..

> As an engineer though PG's second point strikes me as deeply unfair. I joined Yahoo! in 2004 in the UK. The team I joined was exceptional. For a team of 30 people there were about 15 book authored by the team. I personally had written W3C standards and multi Web Standards Project founders littered the team. The rest of the team were coders, much better than I.

Beyond the lines aimed solely to your own glory. Does writing a book means being talented to you?

No more seriously, I'll pass on the rest of your post, but basically, I'm under the impression that you might be looking at things through the prism of your rather different role in that company. That sounds pretty cool to fly the world and talk about the new hot piece of frontend code written by yahoo's javascript mafia, but please realize that somewhere in Santa Clara, random Joe engineer might see Paul's analysis as an opportunity for Yahoo to wake up, acknowledge the problem and rethink itself.

PS: please, no "ad-homonym" attack!

Down vote and no opinion? Hmm.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1596814

It's possible that my memory is faulty on the matter. I was probably around 14 or 15 at the time, but I remember looking for a nice heatsink/fan combo so I could try overclocking, a project which would later lead me to make a really awesome water-cooling contraption (it involved a sizable A/C radiator soaked in ice water, hooked up to a doubly stacked set of 60w and 80w peltier coolers -- I ultimately had problems with frost which ended up frying things).

At any rate, I (think) I remember waiting forever for each individual and unappealing icon to load at this store. It's completely possible that the store was a Yahoo Store knock-off, or that it was before the optimization you mention. I guess we'll never know, since I've probably cleared my cache since then.

The actual quote, from I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

A terrific read. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0520081986