The Glory That Was Yahoo
fastcompany.com
The Glory That Was Yahoo
1–10 of 150 posts
Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo
#2What glory? All these points were acquisitions. Everything this article celebrates were destroyed by Yahoo. The only thing they ever did well was build a portal.
Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo
#3Impressive how consistently wrong were all the decisions on acquisitions and takeovers.
Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo
#4good job jerry yang
Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo
#5Yahoo died because it forgot it was a technology company and stopped innovating. I've also heard that it developed an internal culture dominated by non-technical sales types who didn't understand how to manage their acquisitions or run a technology business and who de-valued those parts of the business. Didn't take long for them to get left in the dust by more innovative rivals.
Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo
#6Yahoo could not decide whether it was a technology company or media company...
Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo
#7Only thing I ever found useful(and still do) is Yahoo Finance.
Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo
#8Yahoo could not decide whether it was a technology company or media company...
The same could be said for most current tech titans. Some are just at different points along their lifecycle than others.
Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo
#9IT's amazing that something so simple as a not having a clear vision/mission could take down a successful company but that's the essentially what happened at Yahoo! When I worked there in 2004 it was just confused, chasing competitors and ideas, never deciding on what it wanted to be when it grew up. I left a year or so later and from what I saw it never figured itself out.
I always wanted the company to focus on a mission about being "useful" - like the digital WD-40/duck tape of your life. Finance, news, fantasy-sports, email, messenger, groups, My Yahoo!, Delicious, Flickr... They're all useful. They could have continued to happily and profitably offer all of these services - and expanded to dozens more - under the mantra of being useful to our every day lives, but Yahoo! was never content with that. They wanted to be eBay, or Google, or Facebook, or YouTube or whoever else was a big player at the time, instead of focusing on the customer loyalty they had already generated.
Having that clear core vision/mission seems like a small thing, but not having one crippled Yahoo! and caused infighting, turnover and confusion that eventually killed it. (Oh, and also Mayer was an idiot.)
Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo
#10Yahoo was great for like the 2 years between when the web started becoming useful and when google figured out search.
They never figured out what they were after the hand edited index of the internet stopped being its reason to exist.