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Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

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Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#151

Post by d23 »

primelens wrote: post #134
revelation wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the majority of the anti-Yahoo bias is simply from the company still being alive, despite not having done anything right the last decade. A functioning market needs companies to fail quickly.

I use a yahoo.com email address (created mid 90s) to subscribe to mailing lists etc. But I check it thru Thunderbird or K-9 email clients. I just visited the Yahoo website after several years and it looks like it could have been designed in '99. You'd think with a billion dollars to spare they could hire a couple of good designers who know their CSS. I guess Google's website has also looked the same for a long time b…

Wow, I actually was just about to go check it out so I could say you were wrong, but I can't really disagree. The upper and left elements have some of the clean/flat trend, but the rest of the page is ridiculously busy.

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#153

Post by Crake »

fosap wrote: post #131

It seems to me they tried to buy a young and hip userbase. MySpace was once young and hip. It was where all the bands were. Tumblr is young, but not hip in any way. It's full of strange and not particular "social" (as in communicating and influencing the mainstream alot) people. Tumblr is full of (besides pron) homestuck fandom and feminists. It's full of some subcultures that are ridiculed by the mainstream (like ML…

Yeah, seriously. My first reaction was, "Wait, you wanted this userbase?"

Yahoo is so unhip that they don't even realize what they've gotten themselves into, probably.

I'm sure some sane people have blogs on tumblr, but they're vastly outnumbered by the "social justice" retards who think that screaming about how all straight white men should be auschwitzed for their sins is some sort of legitimate activism. (Where sins = having been born.)

A lot of the tumblr community's response to the acquisition has been downright hilarious, naturally. They're pretty offended that someone bought "their" blogs without their permission. Any explanation of how the world works is, of course, met with accusations of "privilege" and shouting about how the poster/yahoo/etc is trying to "oppress" their precious PEE-OH-CEES.

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#154

Post by nl »

ajays wrote: post #61
citricsquid wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the word "bias" is wrong here.

Generalisations are dangerous, but I think the people on HN generally aren't Yahoo fans because traditionally they don't appear to value good engineering.

PG summarised it quite well:

But Yahoo also had another problem that made it hard to change directions. They'd been thrown off balance from the start by their ambivalence about being a technology company....The worst consequence of trying to be a media company was that they didn't take programming seriously enough....Yahoo treated programming as a commodity....One obvious result of this practice was that when Yahoo built things, they often weren't very good. But that wasn't the worst problem. The worst problem was that they hired bad programmers.

http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#155

Post by nl »

aetimmes wrote: post #71
ajays wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If Google continues its current growth trajectory and Yahoo! sticks around, I wonder how long it will be before people start rooting for Yahoo! as the "underdog".

Err, that happened quite a while ago. I think people were rooting for Yahoo just before their (failed) Panama Adsense competitor was released. (I say "failed" in the sense that while it kind of worked, it didn't match AdSense's results)

Your comment doesn't make it clear if you realize just how much bigger Google is than Yahoo. Google is worth $300B, Yahoo around $30B.

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#156

Post by pshin45 »

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…

Marissa Mayer's actions since becoming CEO remind me a lot of Steve Jobs' after returning to Apple -

First, get rid of the stragglers and people who don't believe in your vision. MM did this by ending remote work at Yahoo, and Steve Jobs did it by gathering everyone up and telling anyone who wasn't on board to "get the hell out" [1]. This will get rid of all the unmotivated and/or pessimistic people who might hold the company back.

Next, focus heavily on rebranding and spend a crapload of cash to convince the public that your company is different now. Steve Jobs did this with his famous "Think Different" ads [2], and Marissa Mayer seems to be doing this by making big PR waves with big acquisitions of mobile-centric startups. Hopefully this will make your company "cool" again and make the "A players" actually want to work for you (again).

And then of course, build a bunch of awesome products and then TAKE OVER THE WORLD as Apple did. We'll see if Yahoo can do the same.

[1] http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=3067

"Anyway, so Steve said 'You know what, we're going to build a great company. We're going to reinvent the world. And anybody who believes me, like let's get moving. If you don't believe that will happen then get the hell out."

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Different

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#157

Post by logn »

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…

The world needs yahoo. It's great for competition and a place for startups to exit, rather than companies like pinterest acquiring sites to shut them down.

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#158

Post by eli_gottlieb »

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.

Well, that, and teenagers posting stuff about their hobbies. Doesn't even need to be the cool kids anymore. If you can amass enough content from the nerds to get them networking with each other and then make some money off it, it works.

Of course, the issue with Tumblr is the make some money off it part, but Yahoo is from the '90s, so they know not to expect to make money off things.

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