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The Glory That Was Yahoo

fastcompany.com

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Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#131

Post by zillow90 »

BlueAThrow wrote: post #55
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 int…

Are you in dialup internet services group? I heard AOL no longer sending dialer installer floppies.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#133

Post by tim333 »

pattisapu wrote: post #54
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?

No the OP. Mayer was intelligent but probably didn't so the smartest things for Yahoo.

More info here: "Why Marissa Mayer is the ‘least likable’ CEO in tech" https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/31/why-yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-...

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#134

Post by adventured »

cambalache wrote: post #104
kyrra wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204418... Take a look at Google's earnings. in 2017 Google made $95 billion from ads, and $14.2 billion from "other revenue". Which is classified as: Other Revenue: Apps, in-app purchases, and digital content in the Google Play store; Google Cloud offerings; and Hardware. So Google is making money from other places, just not near as much as Ads yet.

Around 13% of total revenue then, growing year on year, that's nice. I would like to know what percentage of net profit is contributed by that fraction.

The other category is producing an operating loss.

Just as a stray example, for 3Q17 Alphabet generated $7.8 billion in operating income.

Google, the subsidiary, generated $8.7 billion in operating income for that quarter.

With continued solid growth of Google's cloud business, and the pull back on burning red ink on Google Fiber, maybe they'll push that other category to break-even soon. Regardless, Google is generating all of their profit. Google is a cash production marvel, nearly on par with the iPhone at this point. They should be able to hit around $40 billion in operating income in that subsidiary this year.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#135

Post by raverbashing »

hello_moto wrote: post #112
pjmlp wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When promotion/compensation is tight to new things (products, internal tools, etc)... Is there any benefit to their career to undertake maintenance?

"is tied to"

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#136

Post by wyclif »

reaperducer wrote: post #64

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.

Also in the Philippines! I can't begin to tell you how many Filipinos I know who, to this very day, have @yahoo.com email accounts and still use Yahoo! Messenger.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#137

Post by yiyus »

deckard1 wrote: post #58
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.

I remember web rings. There were some nice rabbit holes to get lost.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#138

Post by MaxBarraclough »

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #41
itwy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why and why it's interesting?

Because even the people who invented modern computing and have a complete understanding of how the internet works, are still vulnerable to the bad habits that dictate our ability to use the internet. I think what he is also saying is that Yahoo had a built in buffer, that they had to work really hard to fuck up. Because even Genius's turned to Yahoo to Google things for a long time. Also anytime a genius can't do a b…

> still vulnerable to the bad habits

Doesn't it seem more likely it was a joke?

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#139

Post by yiyus »

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #41
itwy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why and why it's interesting?

Because even the people who invented modern computing and have a complete understanding of how the internet works, are still vulnerable to the bad habits that dictate our ability to use the internet. I think what he is also saying is that Yahoo had a built in buffer, that they had to work really hard to fuck up. Because even Genius's turned to Yahoo to Google things for a long time. Also anytime a genius can't do a b…

I totally agree Knuth is a genius, but he does not look like an early adopter at all. He does not use email and I would not be surprised if he does not have a mobile phone (not even a non-smart one).

I think that if I had seen him typing google.com in the yahoo search bar, I'd have just thought: of course.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#140

Post by Endy »

TylerE wrote: post #78
an4rchy wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Similarly, Nintendo is almost 150 years old. They spend most of their history as manufacturer of playing cards.

I think it would be cool if, on their 150th anniversary, they make a Mario Hanafuda deck.
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