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Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

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Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#61

Post by ajays »

citricsquid wrote: post #49
shanelja wrote: post #45

There seems to be a massive anti-Yahoo struggle going on in HN at the moment but I feel we need to look at this impartially. For better or for worse, the fate of the company is tied directly to the actions of Marissa Mayer now, this is no longer 1999 and Yahoo is no longer the same company. They have this image (which they rightly deserve) of being a big, bumbling ancient Behemoth of a company which provides no real…

A portion of the recent disdain / negativity seems to come from the recent cull of work from home employees and statements regarding the value of working from an office to Yahoo, there was quite a bit of anger directed at Mayer for that.

You must be new around here (said in jest).

HN has had an anti=Yahoo bias for a long time; the reasoning behind the bias keep changing ("layoffs", "delicious", "WFH", etc.), but it always seems to be there.

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#63

Post by benjamincburns »

Swizec wrote: post #21
btipling wrote: post #14

Maybe this could have been Posterous had they won that battle with Tumblr. Posterous had the superior product early on, but for some reason it never caught on. I wonder how that works, who wins for what reasons. It does not seem to be for product or technology reasons as I think Posterous had Tumblr beat. It's almost luck and magic who picks up the right kind of early users that lead to success. Admittedly it did see…

Porn. Tumblr has porn. As always, when two technologies are battling, the one porn picks will win.

That's a strange and interesting theory. I can think of a few anecdotal places where this is the case, but I wonder if anyone has done a study of porn as a predictor of platform success/failure...

Edit: Just thinking about the business of porn, this is probably a decent heuristic for simplicity and cost effectiveness. Porn is usually very low budget (compared to other mass market media), with a very high volume of consumers. From my experience in non-profit oceanographic research, nothing focuses an engineering effort like trying to succeed on a shoestring budget (wow, I never thought that'd compare to working in the porn industry).

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#64

Post by wilfra »

captn3m0 wrote: post #15

Does anybody here think that this is a good deal for Yahoo?

It'll take at least a year before we have any idea. For now, just grab the popcorn. It's going to be fun to watch.

Remember people thought Facebook was crazy to pay $1 Billion for Instagram. Now it's probably worth several times that...

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#66

Post by pseut »

neya wrote: post #11

The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance the user experience. A closer look: "to create advertising opportunities...that enhance the user experience." Yahoo, Seriously?

Usually I'd agree with you, but I could see that being true for Tumblr. When I was using Tumblr actively, more than half of the content I followed was some expansive form of advertising, e.g. http://magnumfoundation.tumblr.com/

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#67

Post by freehunter »

UVB-76 wrote: post #60
geoffw8 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and then Instagram

...not to mention Facebook took over as the place for most people to share photos with their friends

I don't think Flickr and Facebook/Instragram really compete, except in the situation where people didn't need Flickr but Facebook/Instagram didn't exist yet. Flickr is more for professional photographers, not a social network for youths to share their photos with their group. If Flickr loses professional photogs, then they're hurting. But they haven't yet.

Instagram is not going to replace Flickr for Flickr's core audience.

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#68

Post by arctangent »

benjamincburns wrote: post #63
Swizec wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Porn. Tumblr has porn. As always, when two technologies are battling, the one porn picks will win.

That's a strange and interesting theory. I can think of a few anecdotal places where this is the case, but I wonder if anyone has done a study of porn as a predictor of platform success/failure... Edit : Just thinking about the business of porn, this is probably a decent heuristic for simplicity and cost effectiveness. Porn is usually very low budget (compared to other mass market media), with a very high volume of c…

I think this might be what you are looking for:

http://history.tamu.edu/faculty/coopersmith/coopersmith%20pe...

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#69

Post by adventured »

shanelja wrote: post #54
lazyjones wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if they stick to their guns and simply improve Tumblr without lowering its value to the community, I can see a real future for Yahoo, one where it isn't just irrelevant, but where it makes it's own products and creates new and exciting applications. I fail to see the connection between the acquisition of Tumblr and your vision of Yahoo suddenly becoming able to create new and exciting applications on its own as a c…

The connection is that success tends to beget success, Tumblr will give them a great platform to build their own cool applications on top of. Honestly, I don't believe this is a 'Buy Tumblr and stick an advert in every ' deal, it just doesn't make sense, they know from experience it will destroy the ecosystem of Tumblr. It would make so much more sense to integrate Tumblr with their own products and build on top of i…

Success absolutely does not tend to beget success. There are radically more examples of success not begetting success, than the other way around (and that always has to be true numerically). There's nothing about past success that favors future success, and I'd argue it's the opposite: success today makes it even harder to maintain it tomorrow, as the market will assault your profit centers relentlessly with competition.

Just ask AOL.

Or ask Yahoo.

Or talk to HP about Compaq. Or ask Gateway how their success beget success.

Or talk to HTC about how their early Android success beget even more success.

Or ask Borders and Blockbuster.

Or AltaVista and Lycos and Excite.

Or travel back in time to 1992, and ask IBM how all their success delivered them a massive wave of red ink.

Or Netscape.

Or ask Sun what happened to their incredible sales momentum circa 1999.

The list is extraordinarily long in tech alone.

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#70

Post by B-Scan »

ivix wrote: post #52
B-Scan wrote: post #2

It looks that lot of their users don't like that idea: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/stop-yahoo-from-buying-tu... Disclosure: I work for iPetitions.

You might want to fix the counter so it handles petitions with responses numbering over 1 million..

Tnx. It was fixed in new branch. Deployed to current one.
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