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The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

economist.com

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Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#81

Post by nolok »

dkrich wrote: post #75

This seems implausible precisely because it’s the crowded view. But can anyone recall a time that the crowd correctly predicted the ascent of an unpopular product or the descent of a popular one? I’m old enough to remember Yahoo’s rise and fall. There was a time people thought Zuckerberg was a greedy fool for turning down a $1 billion bid from Yahoo. Oh yeah did we forget about that? Yahoo failed because they were ou…

> Yahoo failed because they were out-innovated

The worst part is that Yahoo innovated a lot ... In incubators, side projects, etc ... But they failed to bring their innovations to their main products, or to turn their side things into full blown products.

They had no plan, neither overall or per product.

Take emails for exemple, for the longest time (and still now, although not as dominating) THE key to user identity on the internet. Google had a plan to leverage their Gmail userbase and integrated it, Microsoft took its time but they ultimately had a plan to leverage their hotmail userbase, but Yahoo sat on yahoo mails (one of the "big three" of emails basically) for the longest time and did ... Nothing.

Same with flickr, they had people who loved the platform and begged them to take their money and move the product forward as a paid product and instead they let it rot for years. Lots of yahoo properties are like that. It's not that they tried something crazy and it failed, it's not that they got beat by a new comer, they just let their stuff die on their own. Pictures is now even more relevant than ever, and Yahoo should have been at the forefront and yet they let themselves be sidelined by doing nothing.

The best non-yahoo similarity I can find is what Google is doing with Blogger.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#82

Post by sytelus »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #41
sytelus wrote: post #40

In all likelyhood this is a “submarine” article crafted by a PR firm like Definers for a hit job on Facebook: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18511963 There are plenty of short sellers who would benefit from FB’s plummeting stock. In reality, FB’s DAU/MAU are largely unchanged. The stories that young people “deleted Facebook” were downright falsehood. There is simply no viable competition for Facebook in market…

> there are plenty of short sellers who would benefit from FB’s plummeting stock This is a weird meme that’s cropped up in tech circles over the past few years. It’s misleading and incorrect. No short selling fund sells short and then secretly seeds negative PR pieces. If you’re short, your argument is always strengthened by disclosing you put your money behind your words. Short sellers hire private investigators, co…

You are naively wrong. Every single major short seller uses massive media drive to compliment their billion dollar bets. Turn on CNBC and you will see them in opinion panels all the time. They often leverage everything from editorials to articals that are just undercover FUD spreaders in disguised as analysis. There are tons of websites where you can just look at headlines and you know this is coming from big shark who just put a major bet. Remember constant daily stream of articles on how Tesla will fail, it’s unfixable and is running out of money? Do you really think journalists were writing all that up in unison?

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#83

Post by ankit219 »

puranjay wrote: post #70
King-Aaron wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's around 2.23 billion active users you might want to pass that message on to.

The people who should on Facebook aren't there any more - the young and the influential You can't grow with an audience base filled with 50 year olds.

You can't grow when you have onboarded most of the world with access to internet. (total users is 2B. When they are not even in China)

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#84

Post by sytelus »

metildaa wrote: post #52
hrktb wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is simply no viable competition for Facebook in market right now like what Yahoo had in terms of Google. I don’t know if it’s your argument for the decline of facebook being false, but it doesn’t have to come from competition or viable alternatives. People stopping doing something happens all the time, companies going down because of decreasing interest in their service is a normal thing.

None of the people my age that I spent this past evening with (barring my own brother) were still using facebook. An account exists for all of us, but when its gone months or years without use, and there is no Facebook app on your phone, I'd say that user is lost.

Sample of 1 is not statistics. DAU and MAU are statistics.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#85

Post by ben_w »

StephenMelon wrote: post #46
ben_w wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t need to be a better graph, it needs to be good enough to grow. Most FB users probably aren’t “power users”.

Facebook jumped the shark when they started trying to encourage private individuals to “create engagement” and pay to boost their posts. If internal marketing jargon is leaking into your UX, you clearly have serious problems with how your staff are being incentivised. Facebook could have become an engine that allowed society to maximise human capital and but they sacrificed all that potential at the altar of growth h…

Given how they started, I don’t think the shark was ever unjumped.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#86

Post by typon »

fabricexpert wrote: post #54

I know of a few people turning off IG and FB due to the volume of ads, when WhatsApp is monetized lots will do the same. Competitors can offer a similar experience to IG, WA and FB with less ads, because the margins are so massive for FB now, and their products are relatively easily replicated. It's VERY easy for user to switch to a competitor compared with other industries. The scale of the network is hard to achiev…

> It's VERY easy for user to switch to a competitor compared with other industries

Not FOR WhatsApp it isn't. I don't know of an app that all my family/friends would switch to if WhatsApp decided to put ads on it. Switching chat apps with your entire contacts list is very cumbersome.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#87

Post by rubyfan »

jpatokal wrote: post #50
throwaway2048 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo bought plenty of other "next big things" Geocities, tumblr, flikr, viaweb, Broadcast.com, del.icio.us, zimbra, and hundreds of others besides. It wasn't clear at the time Google would be any kind of success, you are looking at things with hindsight.

Yahoo's acquisition track record goes beyond unlucky picking, it shows that they can't maintain or grow the services they bought either. Compare with Google: Maps (Where2), Earth (Keyhole), Waze, YouTube, DoubleClick were all acquisitions they grew to be far larger under Google than they were before. Disclaimer: I work for Google, although I have nothing to do with acquisitions.

At what point did Yahoo’s core business start to shrink or get the stench of being a loser? I have to imagine that Yahoo! acquiring them was a stinker for their users. Did anyone think of Yahoo as bringing strategic value to the services they were acquiring? By the time they bought delicious and tumblr they had a track record with flickr and any of the users of those services saw the acquisition as a negative.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#88

Post by pavlov »

Facebook is not Yahoo — it's much more like Windows. It's ubiquitous, everyone has their pet peeves, and the actual user communities are wildly heterogenous yet tech commentators tend to assume they themselves represent the only kind of user that matters.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#89

Post by app4soft »

dkrich wrote: post #75

This seems implausible precisely because it’s the crowded view. But can anyone recall a time that the crowd correctly predicted the ascent of an unpopular product or the descent of a popular one? I’m old enough to remember Yahoo’s rise and fall. There was a time people thought Zuckerberg was a greedy fool for turning down a $1 billion bid from Yahoo. Oh yeah did we forget about that? Yahoo failed because they were ou…

> Yahoo failed because they were out-innovated. They weren’t the only ones. Lots of highly successful search engines got their lunch eaten by Google.

Yahoo! failed on email issues, not on search engine issues.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#90

Post by ec109685 »

typon wrote: post #86
fabricexpert wrote: post #54

I know of a few people turning off IG and FB due to the volume of ads, when WhatsApp is monetized lots will do the same. Competitors can offer a similar experience to IG, WA and FB with less ads, because the margins are so massive for FB now, and their products are relatively easily replicated. It's VERY easy for user to switch to a competitor compared with other industries. The scale of the network is hard to achiev…

> It's VERY easy for user to switch to a competitor compared with other industries Not FOR WhatsApp it isn't. I don't know of an app that all my family/friends would switch to if WhatsApp decided to put ads on it. Switching chat apps with your entire contacts list is very cumbersome.

I wonder if it works the other way too. If a few key people in a network migrate to another network and stop using the old, will that force the others to move so that communication remains possible?
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