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The Glory That Was Yahoo

fastcompany.com

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Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#61

Post by pjc50 »

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…

They could have survived without a "vision"; lots of boring utility companies do. But in order to do so they would have had to be detail- and customer-focused. This would have been boring, unglamourous and offered at most a few percent growth. They might have had to charge users, heresy.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#62

Post by dugmartin »

netc wrote: post #31

Once I went to Stanford to attend Donald Knuth's Annual Christmas Lecture. During the talk he wanted to show some search query on google. What he did next was interesting. He typed yahoo.com in a browser's address bar and then searched for google on yahoo's search to reach to google!!

When I worked at Encyclopedia Britannica in the late 90s the two top queries on our portal (at the time it was ebig.com which then became eblast.com and then britannica.com) were "yahoo.com" and "sex". I brought this up at a executive level meeting after someone spent several minutes talking about how people came to our site to do serious research on the Internet. It made for a nice awkward silence.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#63

Post by sixothree »

cpeterso wrote: post #37
onli wrote: post #20

The Google search comparisons in the article are strange. Google did not win the search engine war because it had integrated ads, I think it won because the search results were so much better. There might be some indirect connection - less revenue because of a different advertising model, leading to less investment - but I rather think this was just about the technology not being there. Which is maybe not that surpri…

IIRC, Google was one of the first search engines to AND your search terms by default, returning relevant pages from long tail sites. Other search engines at the time would OR your search terms, returning irrelevant pages from popular sites. I think this simple difference in defaults had almost as big an impact as Google's PageRank/BackRub algorithm.

To get an idea of where the search experience was when google came to market - they were the first ones to have the text cursor located in the search box. You didn't have to click the box before you started typing, your cursor was automatically placed in the correct place.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#64

Post by reaperducer »

While Yahoo! is mostly a memory in the U.S., it lives on (or at least its brand does) very strongly in Japan. You see Yahoo! Japan logos everywhere in big cities.

Yahoo! Auctions is just about the only game there, sending fleaBay to the woodshed.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#65

Post by akhilcacharya »

fny wrote: post #24
whoisjuan wrote: post #17

Wow. I didn't know about Yahoo! Music. That was definitely a service ahead of its time. I can see why it failed in the early 2000s (less trust in internet transactions, slower bandwidth) but it's basically the same service that Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, etc, offer nowadays.

IMO, Yahoo music failed because you couldn't take it with you anywhere and because the music industry wasn't ready to part with their $10+ per album mindset. Did I love that service...

You could for a fee - you could transfer songs to an MP3 player with the appropriate DRM.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#66

Post by GioM »

lazyjones wrote: post #50
overcast wrote: post #7

Only thing I ever found useful(and still do) is Yahoo Finance.

There was Yahoo Pipes... and, best of all, Yahoo! Weekly Picks (does anyone remember that?).

Yahoo pipes was ok when it worked, and could have been brilliant. I remember setting up a pipes page to filter the digg front page around the time when the last harry potter book was being released. It worked well enough to keep me from getting spoiled, but I remember the rest of the experience was kind of miserable.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#67

Post by an4rchy »

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…

I'm always skeptical about this argument because it can be seen either way, if the old world companies stuck to their vision/mission they might just be disrupted by new/alternate business models/technology and if they try to experiment (Ex: Google) it can be seen as not having a clear vision. There are very few companies that can sustain through 50 yr cycles but even having a clear vision may not help a company succeed if someone else renders their business useless.

Mission/Vision should evolve and sometimes it might be considered luck and sometimes foresight.

Ex: Nokia: Pulp Mill -> Rubber/Tires -> Cables/Electronics -> Phones

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#68

Post by [deleted] »

commandlinefan wrote: post #23
smacktoward wrote: post #11

> “We didn’t want to call it a portal, because a portal is a door to somewhere else, and we wanted people to stay there,” says Shannon Brayton, a senior manager in Yahoo’s corporate communications department from 1998 to 2001. Of course the company that eventually killed them, Google, found its earliest success by explicitly rejecting this ethos. Google was a search engine, they didn't care if it sent you away; they…

> Google was a search engine, they didn't care if it sent you away; they wanted it to send you away ... only seems obvious in hindsight, though. I worked for a string of internet companies in the late 90's back when people were still trying to figure out what an internet company was supposed to be. The biggest task that they consistently put on me, the tech guy who actually understood what "internet" meant, was makin…

[deleted]

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#69

Post by pmlnr »

smacktoward wrote: post #11

> “We didn’t want to call it a portal, because a portal is a door to somewhere else, and we wanted people to stay there,” says Shannon Brayton, a senior manager in Yahoo’s corporate communications department from 1998 to 2001. Of course the company that eventually killed them, Google, found its earliest success by explicitly rejecting this ethos. Google was a search engine, they didn't care if it sent you away; they…

And with AMP, Google as well, now, wants you to stay.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#70

Post by pmlnr »

whoisjuan wrote: post #17

Wow. I didn't know about Yahoo! Music. That was definitely a service ahead of its time. I can see why it failed in the early 2000s (less trust in internet transactions, slower bandwidth) but it's basically the same service that Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, etc, offer nowadays.

Just like last.fm :(
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