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The Glory That Was Yahoo

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Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#81

Post by cmrdporcupine »

ksangeelee wrote: post #56
bluGill wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. F…

Yes, this. While I appreciated Google's relevancy for search it didn't blow me away that much -- the real special sauce that early-Google had was the extremely lightweight search page. At a time when Altavista, lycos, Yahoo, etc. were just piling on goop after goop onto their landing pages, Google did a really smart thing and disrupted the whole space with its very minimal style. Not even sure how deliberate that was, but it was a huge advantage.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#82

Post by InitialLastName »

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...

Then those voice commands start returning "affiliate" responses.

Amazon's got this figured out. Some significant portion of voice commands are:

-User sees they've run out of widgets

-User says "Alexa, order some widgets"

Having the ability to drive that traffic to one store or another is a big advantage that stores will pay for.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#83

Post by mixmastamyk »

strictnein wrote: post #76

It's almost exactly 10 years since Yahoo rejected Microsoft's acquisition offer. Even at the time it was pretty clear they should have accepted it, but it seems like Yang was too proud. Microsoft offered $45 Billion(!) for Yahoo. https://www.thestreet.com/story/13655197/1/what-would-have-h...

Not to mention it would probably have hastened MS’ demise/reinvention years earlier.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#84

Post by cmrdporcupine »

StevePerkins wrote: post #8
velodrome wrote: post #6

Yahoo 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.

Well, really, Google deliberately kept out of content provision for years in a way that Yahoo didn't. Google was only interested in being the gateway or the platform, not the publisher. That seems to have worked for them.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#85

Post by dalbasal »

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…

Finance, news, fantasy-sports, email, messenger, groups, My Yahoo!, Delicious, Flickr... They're all useful.

I agree these are useful, but they weren't very good businesses. Take email. Email is useful. Most of us use it every day, arguably for more important communications than facebook. Still, facebook is a massive business and email is barely a business at all, generally.

Yahoo was blinkered by chances at big wins for the same reason VCs and nearly anyone in that game is, they're very, very big relative to the medium sized ones.

core vision... they kind of lost that game. The first vision was the directory, which is really just search with a different back-end. This turned out to be an excellent business, but they didn't realize what they had.^ Google ate the whole pie.

The 2nd vision was content, to be a sort of online publication/media business. They half abandoned the first vision for this one. Your examples mostly fit here. This turned out to be (mostly) a terrible business type, and the wide, generalist variant that type which yahoo was going for turned out to be even worse.

I don't really know what they could have done from the early 2000s onwards. Your core vision needs to be, the core of what you do. There wasn't a core anymore.

^even though they basically invented adwords, the business model for that business.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#86

Post by setr »

an4rchy wrote: post #67
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 succe…

I think its the case that changing goals is fine, as long as the current plan of action is clear

but having many, competing, and underspecified goals, is the problem of unclear vision; You're doing a bunch of work, but its not clear where you're trying to go. Driving aimlessly, versus driving to texas and halfway through changing your mind to drive to chicago, are two very different acts.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#87

Post by setr »

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.

I think useful in this case is pretty clear with the WD-40/duct tape example; hardly the best-in-class solution, but when you just need a simple, short-term solution, then Yahoo! should be the place to go.

In the same fashion that excel is the default go-to tool for any kind of basic data management (and now to a certain degree superceded by google spreadsheets), Yahoo! would have been the default place to go basic image hosting, basic blogging, basic chatting, basic news; A good enough solution to meet the 80% of common problems

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#88

Post by henrikschroder »

ballenf wrote: post #60
brucephillips wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ex…

> 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.

I'm sorry, but at least we tried when I was there, and if it hadn't been one of Filo's babies, it would have been killed long before we got to take a stab at it.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#89

Post by maxxxxx »

stevenwoo wrote: post #34
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

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

They still haven't demonstrated that they can make significant money on anything other than advertising. They do a lot of stuff but nothing really turns into a profitable business. Compare that to Microsoft who have shown over decades many times an ability to get into new lines of business profitably.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#90

Post by brucephillips »

setr wrote: post #87
brucephillips wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think useful in this case is pretty clear with the WD-40/duct tape example; hardly the best-in-class solution, but when you just need a simple, short-term solution, then Yahoo! should be the place to go. In the same fashion that excel is the default go-to tool for any kind of basic data management (and now to a certain degree superceded by google spreadsheets), Yahoo! would have been the default place to go basic i…

Ah, then "low end" is the more appropriate descriptor.
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