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What's Actually Wrong with Yahoo's Purchase of Summly

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Re: What's Actually Wrong with Yahoo's Purchase of Summly

#171

Post by RickHull »

rayiner wrote: post #151
emin_gun_sirer wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the record: not Oakleys, not at a beach, but yes, looking to the side. If we're done picking on looks and personal issues, something I tried to avoid very carefully in the article, perhaps we can focus on content and ideas?

Not picking on anybody. From your pic you look like a brogrammer who codes by day, and slays on the LES bar circuit by night. Or am I missing the sense in which we're using "bro" here?

> From your pic you look like a brogrammer

> Or am I missing the sense in which we're using "bro" here?

I'll bite. You are completely missing the sense of brogrammer. Brogrammer refers to behavior and attitude and not looks or activities.

Re: What's Actually Wrong with Yahoo's Purchase of Summly

#172

Post by spoiler »

Am I the only one who is not surprised Yahoo! bought it? I'd be surprised if Google, Apple, Adobe, Microsoft or some other respected company did it.

I mean who really uses Yahoo! these days anyway? The only good thing that they still have to offer is YUI (most notable is its compressor). I don't want to sound like a Google supremacist (although I might be guilty of it), but Google offers a better search engine, a better mail service (people use yahoo mail only for traditional reasons). To me this just feels like Yahoo! wants to join the "we this awesome created by this old."

(I hope) Other companies did it because it improved their service. Yahoo did it so it would be talked about.

I could be wrong, and $30 mil. might be a lot for an attention whoring attempt (let me just point out that it's successful so far), but what else do they have to do with the money they acquired with their past success.

Summly version: Yahoo! bought us in an attempt to save its stale ass from Oblivion.

[If anyone is reading this, they are probably in the gutter (down vote) section of the thread... Welcome to the dark side, we lied about the cookies.]

Re: What's Actually Wrong with Yahoo's Purchase of Summly

#173

Post by cpeterso »

dr1337 wrote: post #150

To see why Yahoo is doomed, let's compare and contrast Yahoo's recent acquisition of Summly with Google's DNNResearch. Summly - Sloppy mobile app that licenses technology from SRI. DNNResearch - Groundbreaking fundamental CS Research into Deep Neural Networks that won Merck's Kaggle Competition. Enough said. Edit links - http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/12/google-scoops-up-neural-net... http://blog.kaggle.com/2012/11/01…

SRI would probably have charged Yahoo more money to license the technology than SRI charged Summly.

Re: What's Actually Wrong with Yahoo's Purchase of Summly

#174

Post by stib »

dmix wrote: post #14
ChuckMcM wrote: post #5

I think the author makes this comment: "Summly's entire business model seems to revolve around catering to this demographic. Frankly, it pains me." I reads like a critique of Chubby Checker's "Twist" from a professor a Julliard. Perhaps, and I say that because I can't know what they were really thinking, but perhaps that was the point. This company had successfully "catered to this demographic" (which was defined as…

> people who could quickly assemble a MVP from existing APIs that appealed to the emerging cohort of buyers and trendsetters. Oh man reading that I just realized that was exactly describing the type of consulting gigs I always get (and I'm young). Are we a side effect of the pump-and-dump VC culture or is this a legitimate new way of developing software/products?

We're living in the future of software development that Brad Cox described in 1986 in his book on Objective-C and "Software ICs".

Re: What's Actually Wrong with Yahoo's Purchase of Summly

#175

Post by gwern »

devcpp wrote: post #157
bitcartel wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely you mean Ka-Shing ;-) The first investor was Horizons Ventures, the investment arm of Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing, who put in $300k.

Mr. Ka-Shing himself, sure. He oversees every single investment his firm makes. I totally believe this. Besides, we don't know Ka-Shing isn't reading TechCrunch all day.

You usually don't get to be a billionaire without spending a lot of time in the office and working pretty hard. To give some apropos examples: Marissa Mayer is reportedly going over every Yahoo hire; _In The Plex_ mentions Page doing the same thing at Google.

Re: What's Actually Wrong with Yahoo's Purchase of Summly

#176

Post by rayiner »

RickHull wrote: post #171
rayiner wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not picking on anybody. From your pic you look like a brogrammer who codes by day, and slays on the LES bar circuit by night. Or am I missing the sense in which we're using "bro" here?

> From your pic you look like a brogrammer > Or am I missing the sense in which we're using "bro" here? I'll bite. You are completely missing the sense of bro grammer. Brogrammer refers to behavior and attitude and not looks or activities.

I think looks and activities is inextricable with "bro"-ness. You're not slaying the LES bar circuit unless you have a certain look along with a certain behavior and attitude.

Re: What's Actually Wrong with Yahoo's Purchase of Summly

#177

Post by astrec »

noonespecial wrote: post #123

Perhaps the license from SRI is the valuable part and for some reason, it conveys intact with the sale? What would SRI charge to license to Yahoo vs a 17yo kid playing "my first startup"?

That was my initial thought too. We're a cynical pair.

Re: What's Actually Wrong with Yahoo's Purchase of Summly

#178

Post by emiliobumachar »

buckerine wrote: post #66
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #46

" But it's critical to keep tabs on the ratio known as 'glue versus thought.' Sure, both imply progress and both are necessary. But the former is eminently mundane, replaceable, and outsource-able. The latter is typically what gives a company its edge, what is generally regarded as a competitive advantage. " I am in finance. I am glue. I take existing people, things (read: capital), and ideas and bolt them together.…

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Are you really equating finance with Facebook and Apple? L.M.A.O.

If two of the three would have to disappear tomorrow, which one would you pick to be left?

Re: What's Actually Wrong with Yahoo's Purchase of Summly

#179

Post by michaelochurch »

I'm sure a lot of people are resentful or disgusted that a 17-year-old was acquired for $30 million. I just find it fucking hilarious. It's awesome, not in some dipshit "American Dream" sort of way, but in the "holy shit, this world is on crack" sense of it. I say, go him!

The next time I am looking for work I am seriously considering getting rid of the resume and coming up with a bullshit startup name. It's pretty ridiculous that my "acq-hire" value in a startup with a bullshit product would be about 50 times the market salary for someone at my level of skill. (I've seen enough inside numbers to know that this is not an exaggeration. Acq-hire values are $2-4M for mediocre engineers and $4-10M for good ones.)

One could do major social-proof arbitrage by offering cuts (of future acq-hires) to people in the tech press. I am dead-fucking-sure this is already happening. It must be. The stakes are too high, and the players too degenerate.

On to the main point: yeah, it is terrifying that large corporate cultures are that desperate for innovation. I feel like they suffer the same problem as command economies. The natural information-theoretic incompetence of central authorities makes them slow to respond to anything (including especially their own creeping obsolescence, for which they compensate by purchasing external talent at extreme prices) but overreactive once they do.

Re: What's Actually Wrong with Yahoo's Purchase of Summly

#180

Post by rayiner »

api wrote: post #74

What this really underscores is that conventional capitalism provides little incentive for fundamental innovation. All this stuff we're gluing together is the product of state-funded research, mostly from the cold war era. DARPANet, the web (CERN), DARPA research on "augmented human intelligence," etc. Stuff like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY (I bet you thought Xerox PARC invented that stuff, right? Or…

People don't really realize it, but the mid 1950's through mid 1970's, besides being the golden age of the American economy, was also the golden age of American innovation, and much of it was bankrolled by DOD money (SRI is, of course, a major defense contractor). Not only was the infrastructure around us mostly built during that time (the highways, power plants, etc) but most concepts in computing: programming languages, AI, GUIs, databases, etc.

Over time I become more and more convinced that the market doesn't produce (much) real innovation. If you look at the stuff that really matters, it's come from one of three sources:

1) Government research labs (NASA) or government funded defense contractors (Lockeed-Martin, SRI, BBN, etc)

2) Government funded universities (MIT and its $1 billion in defense contracts each year)

3) Private companies that have either monopolies (AT&T Bell Labs) or massive market power with entrenched cash-cow products (IBM, Xerox PARC).

Look at innovation that's happening now. Where is it happening? Self-driving cars got a big boost from DARPA in the early 2000's (DARPA Grand Challenge), and is now being funded by Google (which has a ton of cash from its deeply entrenched position in search).

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