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The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

economist.com

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Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#201

Post by kbutler »

ksec wrote: post #135
wybiral wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The best non-yahoo similarity I can find is what Google is doing with Blogger. That's a good point. But to be fair everything "social" that Google has touched has died with the exception of YouTube. In fact Google really hasn't done a great job holding onto many other arenas than their main ones. Blogger has been blasted by Medium. Knol was outlasted by Quora. Google Code was beat by Github. Their "shopping" attemp…

The problem with Google is exactly the same as Microsoft in the 90s. They just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. What that means is, I don't mean it in a small way but in a big way. - Steve Jobs.

Skeumorphism: "Steve pushed very hard to have everything–the felt-cloth table, the game chips–look like they would in real life,” says another former Apple designer. https://www.fastcompany.com/1670760/will-apples-tacky-softwa...

(of a big phone) "you can't get your hand around it...no one's going to buy that." -- Steve Jobs

http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/16/jobs-no-ones-going-to-buy...

Maybe it's better to have strong opinions, even if some are wrong, than to just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.

Or maybe Jobs got really lucky that some of his taste resonated really well.

Hard to tease out the effects of survivorship bias.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#202

Post by hasbot »

abruzzi wrote: post #152
sys_64738 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo failed because they were a directory service that saw the search box as less relevant. Google recognized that searching is the human approach, not ordering stuff into folders, which is an obsessive compulsive trait.

Categorization and catalogs go back centuries so I don’t think I’d call it an OCD trait. Early search engines (90s) were very bad, the change that caught Yahoo was the quality of search. I remember doing searches on altavista, getting a million hits, and at least the first dozen were nothing but log files. The game changer for search was its ability to prioritize relevant content over accidental matches. That started…

The other game changer was speed. Altavista and other early search engines were incredibly slow.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#203

Post by wcfields »

ksec wrote: post #135
wybiral wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The best non-yahoo similarity I can find is what Google is doing with Blogger. That's a good point. But to be fair everything "social" that Google has touched has died with the exception of YouTube. In fact Google really hasn't done a great job holding onto many other arenas than their main ones. Blogger has been blasted by Medium. Knol was outlasted by Quora. Google Code was beat by Github. Their "shopping" attemp…

The problem with Google is exactly the same as Microsoft in the 90s. They just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. What that means is, I don't mean it in a small way but in a big way. - Steve Jobs.

This is the idea that’s been stuck in my head about G but I didn’t have the right words to express it.

I had been thinking of them as “the kid that did everything right on paper: hires the best tutors, got a 4.0 GPA, perfect SAT scores, yet didn’t understand why they weren’t the most popular and liked student”

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#204

Post by elliekelly »

dkrich wrote: post #75

This seems implausible precisely because it’s the crowded view. But can anyone recall a time that the crowd correctly predicted the ascent of an unpopular product or the descent of a popular one? I’m old enough to remember Yahoo’s rise and fall. There was a time people thought Zuckerberg was a greedy fool for turning down a $1 billion bid from Yahoo. Oh yeah did we forget about that? Yahoo failed because they were ou…

> Facebook has demonstrated they have vision and the ability to execute and adapt.

I'm a former attorney who worked in the investment industry and one of the shitty things I had to do when I first got out of law school was review footnotes on marketing material. In that industry there is one footnote that is basically the gospel: "Past performance not indicative of future results."

Has Facebook demonstrated their vision and ability to adapt? Absolutely. So did Kodak, Sears, and Apple. Though Apple managed a turn-around they certainly had a point where they very likely would have gone the way of Sears until they brought Jobs back.

Prior ability to innovate and execute means nothing. The important thing is continuing innovation. What the company is doing _right now_ is orders of magnitude more important than the longest track record of success. If anything, I think innovation becomes more difficult the bigger a company gets and the higher customer and investor expectations get.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#205

Post by JumpCrisscross »

typon wrote: post #86
fabricexpert wrote: post #54

I know of a few people turning off IG and FB due to the volume of ads, when WhatsApp is monetized lots will do the same. Competitors can offer a similar experience to IG, WA and FB with less ads, because the margins are so massive for FB now, and their products are relatively easily replicated. It's VERY easy for user to switch to a competitor compared with other industries. The scale of the network is hard to achiev…

> It's VERY easy for user to switch to a competitor compared with other industries Not FOR WhatsApp it isn't. I don't know of an app that all my family/friends would switch to if WhatsApp decided to put ads on it. Switching chat apps with your entire contacts list is very cumbersome.

> Not FOR WhatsApp it isn't

I got my friends and family to switch to iMessage and Signal. The method was simple: I stopped responding on WhatsApp and spun up new threads, when planning something, on those apps. WhatsApp’s stickiness is overrated.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#206

Post by cronix »

elliekelly wrote: post #204
dkrich wrote: post #75

This seems implausible precisely because it’s the crowded view. But can anyone recall a time that the crowd correctly predicted the ascent of an unpopular product or the descent of a popular one? I’m old enough to remember Yahoo’s rise and fall. There was a time people thought Zuckerberg was a greedy fool for turning down a $1 billion bid from Yahoo. Oh yeah did we forget about that? Yahoo failed because they were ou…

> Facebook has demonstrated they have vision and the ability to execute and adapt. I'm a former attorney who worked in the investment industry and one of the shitty things I had to do when I first got out of law school was review footnotes on marketing material. In that industry there is one footnote that is basically the gospel: "Past performance not indicative of future results." Has Facebook demonstrated their vis…

> Though Apple managed a turn-around they certainly had a point where they very likely would have gone the way of Sears until they brought Jobs back.

The $150M investment Microsoft gave Apple had a lot to do with saving Apple, as well. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/29/steve-jobs-and-bill-gates-wh...

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#207

Post by function_seven »

gnicholas wrote: post #200
nefitty wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can try this logic game here: https://www.philosophyexperiments.com/wason/Default.aspx

An interesting test — thanks for posting! They really need to mix up the order of correct answers though. For me (spoiler alert), all of the questions had the exact same correct answers. Given the number of permutations, it seems highly unlikely that the test is randomized and I just happened to get this arrangement.

Mine didn’t. Correct answers for me on Q1 we’re different than Q2&3. I think they put the “A” sides on the left and the “B” sides on the right, and only randomize between each pair.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#208

Post by jedberg »

titzer wrote: post #69

Personally I haven't been able to muster empathy for people who amassed a thousand lifetimes' worth of personal wealth and then are suddenly threatened with the potential of being left with...only a few hundred lifetimes' worth.

I don't think you're supposed to empathize with those people. You're supposed to empathize with the people who are about to lose their jobs who aren't wealthy, and the people who currently are comfortable with a bunch of FB stock that may not be worth a lot in the future, making them uncomfortable.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#209

Post by throwawaylolx »

richardknop wrote: post #140
tokai wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Zuckerberg knows they need to create or acquire the next big thing to make it in the long Isn't that exactly what yahoo did?

But Yahoo pretty much ruined companies they bought like Tumblr for example. I’m not saying Facebook won’t make the same mistake but so far they have done a relatively good job with Instagram and WhatsApp. Both of them are very popular and growing. Much different story than Yahoo, at least so far.

>they have done a relatively good job with Instagram and WhatsAp

WhatsApp announced that they'll introduce ads, and the co-founder left the company due to privacy concerns.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#210

Post by grigjd3 »

tasuki wrote: post #160
titzer wrote: post #69

Personally I haven't been able to muster empathy for people who amassed a thousand lifetimes' worth of personal wealth and then are suddenly threatened with the potential of being left with...only a few hundred lifetimes' worth.

Well, perhaps you'd like to try harder? Or do you think they don't deserve your empathy? In the end, people with infinite money have to deal with many of the same issues we deal with: relationship/personal issues, health problems, death of close ones, etc.

I somehow doubt Mark Zuckerberg is worried about how to pay for his kids' college tuition (if he has kids, I really don't know).
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