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What Happened to Yahoo

paulgraham.com

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Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#171

Post by gokhan »

mrshoe wrote: post #22

Apple 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…

On producing good software...

Apple's software always runs on controlled environments. I wonder if they can pay that much attention to detail if they build for Web (Google) or any random hardware (Microsoft). Apple somehow avoids the added complexity of supporting the majority. For now it works, though.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#172

Post by corin_ »

andrew1 wrote: post #55
pxlpshr wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If most (all) of your early employees are hackers, how does it not make sense to hire a hacker to manage HR?

Because different jobs need different skill sets? Why does being a 'hacker' make you qualified or even appropriate to manage something like HR or marketing?

The logic isn't that "any hacker is appropriate for HR work", but that a hacker who is suitible is better than a non-hacker.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#173

Post by revorad »

kvs wrote: post #61

Here is a Forbes article from 1998 Spring about Anil Singh and his team's perspective: http://www.forbes.com/asap/1998/0223/068.html

Choice quote:

"I'm here to generate sales for the company, and whether that means we have good products, bad products, or indifferent products," he says, "I have a job to do -- meeting our plans from a top- line standpoint."

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#174

Post by philwelch »

jacobolus wrote: post #165
philwelch wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the second Jobs era, Apple's CEO, central technology, and (in the early years) the bulk of their executive team were directly installed from NeXT. Dogs and smoking were banned from the campus, the icon garden was taken down, Apple's entire industrial design was dropped in favor of new directions, and almost all of their software technology was eventually abandoned along with the Newton and the traditional Old Worl…

I agree with you that the emphasis changed dramatically from the Apple of before Jobs’ return, which had a (relatively to now) large basic R&D arm, and a vision for the future alternating between wheel-spinning and incoherence. But I don’t think the Apple of today is especially like NeXT either, probably mostly because the markets it aims for are so completely different. For example, the first iMacs and iBooks don’t…

A lot of good thoughts, but...

But as OS X has matured, it has felt ever more like "classic" Mac OS, not less.

Past the transition from public beta to release and maybe a couple small points after that, I don't see how this is true at all, and I've extensively used both. What similarities do you notice?

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#175

Post by pointillistic »

mrshoe wrote: post #22

Apple 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…

Speaking of Apple. Perhaps for personal reasons PG omits to mention the business trajectory and the personality of the leaders.This includes the element of luck that is far greater component of success that a culture, even the hacker culture. This doesn't mean that the culture is not important but you cant have an argument about "what went wrong with Yahoo" without "what went right with Yahoo" or Google, etc. In case of Yahoo a nothing HTML page was propelled to a media empire during the crazy dotcom boom, while Google stumbled as randomly onto the search goldmine. Both companies were created in the PhD classrooms of Stanford U, not in a garage like Apple.

Next both Google and Yahoo brought in professional executives or "suits" to run the firms, speak to Wall St. etc. Eric Schmidt is a professional CEO, not a hacker. He was at Sun, then he tried to revive Novell and then was tapped for Google.Yahoo is also run by a professional CEO now. How does that compare to the single minded life long vision of Steve Jobs? What role the leadership and their personalities plays in running the companies beyond the culture? Remember Apple was a "has been" company with plenty of suits and they even fired Steve Jobs at some point.

There is a fundamental flaw in PG's argument, he is trying to have a rational explanation about an irrational path to success of failure.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#176

Post by dieterrams »

mrshoe wrote: post #22

Apple 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 is a user experience-centric culture, with a profound appreciation for how excellent engineering makes better user experiences possible. This definitely doesn't strike me as hacker-centric in that Googley/Facebookey way that PG describes. Apple undoubtedly employs many talented hackers, but they're not so much the center of its culture as they are its foundation. A brilliant and responsive UI with a stupidly simple implementation will be more highly prized than a work of coding genius that only marginally furthers user experience.

Of course, if you want to extend the idea of hacking so that one can speak of user experience hackers, then Apple would definitely qualify as having a "hacker-centric culture".

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#177

Post by gaius »

eugenejen wrote: post #96
strlen wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One caveat: best technical recruiters are former programmers (it's an automatic plus if a recruiter tells me "I'll take your LaTeX resume, I used it a lot in grad school").

I can attest this. I got called from Google during 2006. The HR guy screened me on the phone with all TCP/IP questions. I was amazed because he knew so much about TCP/IP and UNIX socket. It turned out that he was a former software engineer in Bell Lab/Lucent. It has been the best initial phone screen that I ever have.

Why would a programmer go work in HR?

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#178

Post by bambax »

sh1mmer wrote: post #151
321speak wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My sense from meeting Yahoo devs is that they are ok, in that they have the credentials, but didn't seem very passionate or excited about new tech. Can you bring up some examples where Yahoo is pioneering a new field? (search, media delivery, social etc, what ever Yahoo as a company is really excited and passionate about internally...)

How about Hadoop? Sure Google released the Map/Reduce paper, but it was Yahoo who wrote 90+% of the current industry standard. What about Node.js? That's pretty en vogue right now. We are currently hiring Node.js engineers and have a number of core contributors in various parts of the company. YUI and our other front-end work at Yahoo! is world class. People like Crockford are considered leading experts in doing qual…

Yahoo Search API (whatever its real name is... BOSS or something?) is also fantastic and much superior to Google's (which isn't even really a search api).

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#179

Post by bambax »

pg wrote: post #47
srslydude wrote: post #38

[edit: this thread has some insightful replies by others that are worth reading.] I'm sorry, this may be PG's backyard, but I've gotta call bullshit. Note: I am not a Yahoo employee or corporate shill. 1. "At Yahoo this death spiral started early." Apparently this death spiral took TWELVE YEARS (the WWW is 20 years old), and Yahoo is still #1 (or #2) in terms of total properties on the web. How is this a death spiral…

I never implied all the Yahoo engineers are idiots. In fact I explicitly said the opposite: that the quality was uneven. Uneven means some good, some bad. Also, Viaweb didn't get hosed after being bought by Yahoo. It prospered enormously. I don't bear them any ill will.

Uneven does not necessarily mean "some good, some bad"; it could mean "some bad, some terrible" or "some good, some fantastic" or any combination thereof.

In fact, taken literally, it is devoid of meaning, because any group of human beings can be described as "uneven" for any descriptor one can think of.

But it is not used literally in the article; it is used as a euphemism for "bad", as opposed to the quality of Google engineers (which one guesses is "even"...?)

Now you're playing with words; assume what you mean.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#180

Post by othermaciej »

mrshoe wrote: post #77
adammichaelc wrote: post #58

Earlier 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…

Apple is very design-driven, but to a large extent design is treated as an engineering function. Also, the attitude towards aspects of the product that are not directly user-facing (such as APIs, "engine" type code like WebKit or llvm, kernel internals, etc) is quite hackerly but also very much driven by thinking about ultimate benefits to the user.
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