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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...
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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.
Is there any benefit to their career to undertake maintenance?
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 int…
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Every search engine of Yahoo's era supported ANDing terms. It didn't help. The result you wanted was still swimming beneath 7 pages of trash. Commonly it wasn't even in the results because the AND was too restrictive. Backrub is what made Google so much better. Google also really focused on search and made numerous improvements, but the linchpin was backrub.
It was also ludicrously fast at returning results compared to everyone else at the time. I was shocked at the time that a dynamically generated page could return so quickly. I still to this day miss Altavista's advanced operators though
I was in high school at the time in the 90's. Where I lived the internet wasn't very widespread only place I could access it was via dial up in our school library I remember trying to do school projects having to go through the search engine dance you'd start by searching yahoo, then infoseek, then lycos, then altavista one by one slogging through pages of useless results trying to find what you were looking for.
I was in 8th or 9th grade we were given an assignment to write a report about the "G8 forum" none of the search engines I used at the time were capable of returning meaningful results for all the possible combinations of "G8", "G+8", "G and 8", "Group of 8", "G AND 8 AND Summit OR Forum" I could think of. I'd just get pages and pages of nonsense compounded by the fact my school's dial up was so slow - a 33 kb modem I think it was an exercise in frustration.
I complained to my parents about it over dinner and my Dad said 'oh you should try google.com' First time I'd ever heard about google, the next day at school I tried a google search and got meaningful results on the very first page. I don't think I ever used Yahoo or any of those other sites again after that.
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...
Altaba (Yahoo!'s Alibaba assets) is worth $68 Billion[1], so no, they probably did the right thing. [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AABA/
If they were given MS stock as part of the deal, that $45 billion would be worth around $130 billion.
So, still probably a bad idea to reject the offer.
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…
Of course operating under overly vague generalities while believing they are mission/vision statements is nearly as bad as operating with none.
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 ;-)
Every 1995 site... a tally of which was hardly statistical noise compared to today's numbers.
I'm surprised that AOL isn't really discussed in this article. I always assumed Yahoo's ethos, as the one-stop shop on the internet ("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") came straight out of AOL's playbook. What I know for sure is that I, and a lot of other people, immediately felt comfortable with Yahoo when we first started using the…
Your comment is spot on.
It also handcuffed them to their established business model(s) and "properties", because they couldn't afford to take a revenue hit or self-cannibalize to transition to the next S-curve eating the world. Given that, demise is inevitable.
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…
that's not appropriate..
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It's very possible that they produce a lot of revenue but no profit like Uber. On the other hand I would assume Google Cloud is making money since Azura and AWS are profitable for MS and Amazon.
Google has said that it's (at least) a billion per quarter. [0] [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/01/google-cloud-revenue-passes-...