The essay seems to draw the conclusion that the difference between Yahoo and Google was more or less a matter of historical happenstance. Google did well because at the time Google was being built, they simply weren't (and couldn't be) part of the typical business model of the day, while Yahoo simply became trapped by it.
What Happened to Yahoo
121–130 of 282 posts
Re: What Happened to Yahoo
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
So it's hackerly...
No, it's not. That gets at the very essence of my original comment. One of the assertions in the article is that a hacker culture is a necessary ingredient for a successful technology company. I see Apple as a counterexample to this argument. And it's a counterexample that shouldn't be ignored. Apple is driven by design (industrial design, product design, graphic design). They think about products, not technology. Th…
I agree completely, Apple looks at technology as an enabler of design, not the driver of it.
Re: What Happened to Yahoo
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is Rich Facebook going to overlook?
In a few years it will be glaringly obvious.
My current guess is that Tumblr is going to figure out the real potential of their "reblogging" system sometime in the next 18 months and whatever strange new beast that has become will make "liking" look like using an AOL keyword.
Re: What Happened to Yahoo
#124"Most technology companies eventually get taken over by suits and middle managers." Interesting statement. I suspect this process is well under way at Google these days. But why does this happen? Is it just that once companies grow large enough, you need middle managers, (who then consolidate power and control)? Is there a more nuanced explanation?
Companies tend to protect their cash cows. I suspect a Noogler would be fired to suggest they should get out of search and do something else, just like MS (will take) took a long time to release an Office killer.
When process and hires are set up to maximize an offer, over the years the company gets fossilized "doing things this way".
It happens on every industry. You find some awesome source of revenue, you build upon it, you get blind to other options.
Re: What Happened to Yahoo
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it's not. That gets at the very essence of my original comment. One of the assertions in the article is that a hacker culture is a necessary ingredient for a successful technology company. I see Apple as a counterexample to this argument. And it's a counterexample that shouldn't be ignored. Apple is driven by design (industrial design, product design, graphic design). They think about products, not technology. Th…
Apple has many core competencies other than software, including hardware design, marketing, and retail. But the common theme I see between them is that they refuse to do things the way everyone else does, and that they hire the best and brightest to work on their problems. Also, they never accept that something can't be done. To me, this sounds very hackerly, just applied to different domains.
Another core competency that Apple has, one that neither Yahoo or Google seem to be able to figure out, is the ability to create, penetrate and dominate new markets. For all the various products Google creates, it's still essentially an advertising company using search as its publishing media in terms of what makes them money.
Very pitifully few of Google's projects have either created new markets they can dominate, or have penetrated existing markets to the point they can drive billion dollar business units. Gmail, Maps and Android exception to that point, but Google is woefully incompetent in most other respects. And the first two in that list are simply different takes on the search paradigm while Android is a knock-off of the iPhone OS (a really good knock-off, but certainly not a game changing original new idea).
Re: What Happened to Yahoo
#126Yahoo went bad because: 1. It has no notable engineering foundation; 2. It has no clear vision about what it is and where it's going; and 3. Like Microsoft, it's put a business person in charge, which is the death knell of any tech company. You need someone with a technical foundation or a product person, not a business wonk.
Yahoo went bad because a business person was put in charge? From my point of view I would say that is generally the rule rather the exception. Particularly for those firms wanting to go public.
I'm going to defer to mixmax's quip about putting a gardner in charge of a gardening firm's finances [1] as the alternative.
You can't argue Jobs or Schmidt are not business people. Although Schmidt could be used to either refute or backup your point depending on how you feel about Google these days.
Re: What Happened to Yahoo
#127Somebody please help poor pg and design him some prettier buttons than those purple beveled monstrosities..
Re: What Happened to Yahoo
#128> " You can get programmers who would never have come to you as employees by buying their startups. But so far the only companies smart enough to do this are companies smart enough not to need to." Yahoo did do this through the Inktomi (Yahoo Search, 2003-2010) acquisition. I've worked in that organization and learned a tremendous amount from the people. At that time the hiring bar had been considerably raised from w…
Unfortunately, for many reasons, that talent has slowly bled out
This reverts back to the original article. Poor strategic leadership.
Re: What Happened to Yahoo
#129Apple is very conspicuously absent from this article. ...the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people that the big winners have had. Is Apple a big winner, like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook (the other companies he mentions repeatedly)? Bigger. (Check the last 1, 5 or 10 years on Google finance for the GOOG or MSFT comparison. FB is not public, but...) Do they have this…
Apple isn't a software company per se--they have a lot of EE's, other engineers, industrial designers, and so forth. These people have different cultures from hackers, by and large. But by and large they seem to demand the most from everyone they hire, including programmers. They don't have the compulsion to fill up on staff as much as they want to have the best people. It's impossible to tell without working there (…
But for all that, I don't think Apple's ever found themselves with the reputation of the type of single-minded overarching elitist snobbery as the backbone of the hiring process in the same way Google has.
"...but they didn't have the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring..."
Apple seems to want to hire the best, but the best being based on actual capability instead of the school you went to.
Re: What Happened to Yahoo
#130I find it interesting that Yahoo is considered not to have a "hacker" culture when they produce things such as YUI, YQL and YSlow which seem to have no reason to be there other than that they think of themselves as a company that has hackers and coding in their DNA. I guess these are small examples in the large scheme of things but it still seems odd that there is this disconnect - at the high level, they are just media company, at the low level they are right there in the hacker community producing, I would say, above their weight.