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The Glory That Was Yahoo

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Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#51

Post by brucephillips »

joering2 wrote: post #40
stevenwoo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's income stream from advertising is not as vulnerable as Yahoo's home page for the internet model as far as I know.

Not AS vulnerable but in the near future when you search thru voice commands and hear results back, all those google ads that your eyes scan can be thrown out of window. Here is relevant read: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/27/alphabet-investors-voice-sea...

For how many of your daily searches would you prefer to use voice? Voice has much higher latency and lower bandwidth than text/vision.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#52

Post by brucephillips »

russellbeattie wrote: post #9

IT'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 m…

What do you mean "useful"? Every viable product is useful for something. That doesn't narrow it down.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#53

Post by mturmon »

bluGill wrote: post #33
code_duck wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even back in the day, I preferred Altavista. I have never perceived yahoo or any of their products as good, or used any regularly, other than a few that were acquired like Flickr.

yahoo was before Altavista. When they started a table of contents of the web it was great - back when the web was small enough that you could make a table of contents (at the time gopher was bigger than the web and growing faster, and gopher was mostly accessed via the table of contents). When Altavista came yahoo's index was better because instead of having to figure out the right search terms you could navigate a l…

Well, Yahoo was founded in March 1995 and Altavista was opened in December 1995, which I think is generally the same time period.

My perception as a technical user at the time is different than yours -- Altavista was much more influential to me than the curated table of contents that Yahoo had.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#54

Post by pattisapu »

russellbeattie wrote: post #9

IT'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 m…

> (Oh, and also Mayer was an idiot.)

Elaborate?

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#55

Post by BlueAThrow »

saralily wrote: post #2

What 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.

I worked for AOL, who Verizon recently merged with Yahoo . It was inevitable they destroyed the startups . Yahoo processes made us look lean in comparison, and we were another old web 1.0 company . The first thing they make you do is port to their tech stack and so much time is spent on that process and approvals from central teams that it's a wonder anything gets done . They've got their own package manager, own internal ec2 clone, own build system, own Linux distro, own deploy system, and if any of those things were good it might make sense, but they're mid-2000s tech in quality .

Flickr disappeared for a crucial year post merger, and apparently they were porting to Yahoo's internal account system: https://gizmodo.com/5910223/how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost... . At least that produced some user facing unification compared to some of the tasks we had . The attitude has not improved since .

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#56

Post by ksangeelee »

bluGill wrote: post #33
code_duck wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even back in the day, I preferred Altavista. I have never perceived yahoo or any of their products as good, or used any regularly, other than a few that were acquired like Flickr.

yahoo was before Altavista. When they started a table of contents of the web it was great - back when the web was small enough that you could make a table of contents (at the time gopher was bigger than the web and growing faster, and gopher was mostly accessed via the table of contents). When Altavista came yahoo's index was better because instead of having to figure out the right search terms you could navigate a l…

When I first saw Google I'd been using AltaVista almost exclusively because it allowed phrase searching and keyword exclusion. Google seemed primitive by comparison.

However, it was light and fast at a time when most of my access was via 64k lines or dial-up. AltaVista had become increasingly cluttered with GIF advertising and 'portal' nonsense.

AltaVista became slow and cumbersome, while Google was fast and clean. For me, that was AltaVista's downfall.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#57

Post by [deleted] »

pjmlp wrote: post #43
paulryanrogers wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google seems to be falling into a similar pattern with it's many different attempts at chat apps

Not only chat apps. Android, Flutter, ChromeOS, PWA, Fuchsia... Feel like using the NDK on Android? Legacy gradle plugin, Gradle stable plugin with cmake, ndk-build or eventually the new C/C++ support being developed by Gradle. Ah, and then there is Blaze as well.

[deleted]

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#58

Post by deckard1 »

irrational wrote: post #36

I remember back in 1995 getting on Yahoo one day and going through every single category and clicking every website link in the entire directory (I was in college and bored). I like to tell my kids that at one point it was possible to visit every singe website on the WWW ;-)

There was a brief period of time where visiting a link felt like a new adventure. We take the simplicity of a "link" for granted today, probably because most links are just clickbait now.

Eventually links turned into time-consuming traps of "under construction" animations and icons and popup advertising hell. But even then, the Internet truly felt like the wild west.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#59

Post by pjc50 »

saralily wrote: post #2

What 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.

The title is a parody of "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Helen

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#60

Post by ballenf »

brucephillips wrote: post #52
russellbeattie wrote: post #9

IT'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 m…

What do you mean "useful"? Every viable product is useful for something. That doesn't narrow it down.

What it meant to me was that Yahoo couldn't help itself from taking every successful product or acquisition and screwing it up, deprecating it or otherwise wholly missing why its users valued it.

These have been listed in greater detail elsewhere, but Y! Games is one of the most glaring examples where they had a massive, loyal audience and just destroyed the community bit by bit.

Flickr is the other commonly sited example where Yahoo just didn't seem to understand why the users valued it so much. Every year they'd nerf some core aspect of the product trying to turn it into something less useful but more "trendy".

Finally, for me, the "my.yahoo.com" customizable landing page / rss feed had enormous utility and huge potential but was just left to rot.

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