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What Happened to Yahoo

paulgraham.com

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Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#221

Post by geebee »

pointillistic wrote: post #175
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…

Eric Schmidt does wear a suit, that is true. But I always thought that the type of professional CEO chosen by yahoo and google essentially told the story of the future of the two companies. Eric Schmidt has a PhD in CS (according to wikipedia, he wrote his dissertation on solving problems in distributed computing). Terry Semel has a BS in accounting and worked in the entertainment industry for two decades (warner bros).

I don't know much more about the two men, but I'm 100% certain that Schmidt did a colossal amount of programming in his day, and I really doubt that Semel ever did, though I can't be sure of this. This has to have a serious effect on the hacker culture. If nothing else, Google's choice sends a message to programmers that technical ability matters all the way to the top. Yahoo's says it doesn't, at least not enough to be a required attribute of the highest ranking person at the company.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#222

Post by username3 »

jacobolus wrote: post #188
philwelch wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Mostly in the little details, and the overall emotional feeling. Examples: (It’s not a change since OS X 10.0, but....) Right from the beginning having the menu bar at the top was better than the NeXT per-window menu bars (there were legal reasons for the NeXTStep behavior, sure, but a menu at the top feels so Mac-ish to me, that that difference alone is huge). Much of the conventions for menu organization/structure…

Did you type all this for a reply or did you copy and paste it from writing it before?

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#223

Post by jacobolus »

username3 wrote: post #222
jacobolus wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly in the little details, and the overall emotional feeling. Examples: (It’s not a change since OS X 10.0, but....) Right from the beginning having the menu bar at the top was better than the NeXT per-window menu bars (there were legal reasons for the NeXTStep behavior, sure, but a menu at the top feels so Mac-ish to me, that that difference alone is huge). Much of the conventions for menu organization/structure…

Did you type all this for a reply or did you copy and paste it from writing it before?

Typed it. Thought a bit, clicked edit, typed some more, thought a bit, etc.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#224

Post by GFischer »

It's bad to nitpick, but I take issue with the quote "It's hard for anyone much younger than me to understand the fear Microsoft still inspired in 1995.":

I was born in 1981 and I clearly remember the fear and awe Microsoft inspired in 1995 :) .

There were articles about how Bill took things personally and crushed competition.

I read the 1992 biography "Hard Drive" ( http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Drive-Making-Microsoft-Empire/dp/... ); Bill was kind of a role model back then (a successful and well-known technologist).

Edit: See also ojbyrne's comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1596737

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#225

Post by encoderer »

shalmanese wrote: post #50

"In technology, once you have bad programmers, you're doomed. I can't think of an instance where a company has sunk into technical mediocrity and recovered." In any conflict, there is always a risk of fighting the last battle. I see today many companies, inspired by the lessons learned from the first dot-com bubble, making the opposite mistake; thinking that they need to be a technology company when they're really a…

I disagree with your "incompetent" assessment of Twitter.

First, there's a lot of false info out there about what parts of Twitter were built using which technologies and why it had uptime issues.

Second, their issue was massive scalability. A high-class problem.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#226

Post by encoderer »

btilly wrote: post #40
strlen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bad programmers wrote a bad search engine, and Yahoo lost all their traffic to the good search engine? Yahoo didn't have their own search technology, until acquisition of Inktomi in 2003 (they used Inktomi to serve their results prior to using Google, whom they used until ~2004). Correct way to put it is "they didn't hire enough good programmers to build a search engine". A web search engine isn't something bad pro…

More than that, Yahoo's deliberate strategy at the beginning was to not build their own search engine, but just to buy the services of whatever was best out there. At one point that was Alta Vista. Later it was Inktomi. After all search was a well-studied problem, and they thought it was pretty much solved. So why put a lot of energy into building expertise in how to build what they thought would be a commodity. Then…

I don't think anybody thought search was "solved" in the 90's, nor today.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#227

Post by jleader »

pxlpshr wrote: post #41
mixmax wrote: post #36

"in the early days Facebook made a point of hiring programmers even for jobs that would not ordinarily consist of programming, like HR and marketing." No offense, but hiring programmers for HR seems like a terrible idea. HR people's main capacity is to understand people and relationships, not exactly something programmers are known for being good at.

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

Recruiting is part of HR; at fast-growing companies, it's a pretty big part. Wouldn't it make sense to hire some recruiters who are able to distinguish at least roughly between good hackers and bad ones?

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#228

Post by JustinSeriously »

sliverstorm wrote: post #10

As far as I was concerned (admittedly I was still a kid at the time), all that mattered was the Yahoo homepage was garish and full of ads, and the results were hard to sift through (because they were full of 'sponsored links' and the page was equally garish). Google was the antithesis of all that, and that's why I used, liked, and rooted for Google.

I went through the same thing with Infoseek. They used to be a fantastic search engine, with a full suite of boolean operators and everything. Then they become the Go Network, and their simple homepage was turned into crowded portal.

Half the reason I eventually switched to Google was because of their anti-portal philosophy.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#229

Post by akadruid »

robk wrote: post #184
elblanco wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> Gmail, Maps and Android Those are very big exceptions.

The thing that those 3 have something in common with their search engine and Adwords; they all inspired the same initial reaction: "Someone's finally fixed what's wrong with incumbant market players - this is a game changer". Do you remember what it was like in the days when spammed to death AltaVista, "2MB inbox" Hotmail, static image Multimap, clunky WinMobile and popups/animated gif banners were the kings? (Android is not quite the same, since the iPhone had pointed the way).

I've not seen that many software products which were so obviously disruptive; it's no wonder they became giant-killers. Facebook is the only other one I can think of.

On the other hand, some of their other big products have not be a huge success precisely they haven't been game-changers. Google Docs, for example, might be a good example of a web office suite; but it's hardly a game changer as far as office suites go, because it doesn't do some of the core things that people do daily with office suites. It was clear from the beginning that it would be a slow starter. Whereas Maps for example, you knew at the beiginning that nothing else could touch it

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#230

Post by JesseAldridge »

rmc wrote: post #205
JesseAldridge wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they have this obnoxiously elitist focus? No. You sure about that? From http://www.apple.com/jobs/us/welcome.html : "Whether you want to be an iPod engineer, a Concierge at an Apple Retail Store, or a sushi chef on an Apple campus (yes, we have sushi chefs), we’re looking for the best. People who are smart, creative, up for any challenge, and incredibly excited about what they do. In other words, Apple people. You…

Every company says the want to hire the best.

Which is why I didn't say the claim was false. I just have doubts that it's true.

Googling "apple hiring process" turns up this:

http://www.ifoapplestore.com/stores/hiring.html

"And lastly, the competition for jobs is intense! Sr. v-p Retail Ron Johnson has said it's tougher to be hired than being accepted by Stanford University--literally. During one talk he said Apple hired 978 store employees during 2002 from an applicant pool of 16,438, or less than a 6% chance of being hired (Stanford accepted 12.6 % for 2005). Put another way, only 1 in 17 applicants is hired."

Sure that's just retail, but it seems reasonable to guess that a similar hiring process exists for other fields.

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