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What Happened to Yahoo

paulgraham.com

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Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#261

Post by acqq »

jonknee wrote: post #217
pointillistic wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is a hacker... He even wrote lex.

Wow that's interesting: I've found a paper from 1975

Lex − A Lexical Analyzer Generator

http://staff.ustc.edu.cn/~shzhang/staff/lesk-lex.pdf

and Google's Eric E Schmidt was only 20 at that time according to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_E._Schmidt

He got BSEE on Princeton in 1976. OK, both Bell Labs and Princeton are in New Jersey, but it's still quite impressive to be the developer of lex in Bell Labs as a 20-year old Princeton student.

Of course even more impressive is being 129th richest person in the world in 2006.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#262

Post by danbeam »

Revisor wrote: post #216
nose wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are a few examples: http://trafficserver.apache.org/ http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/ http://github.com/yahoo http://yuilibrary.com http://developer.yahoo.com/yap/guide/caja-support.html http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/ http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/ http://developer.yahoo.com/hadoop/

And let's not forget the very useful and free Yahoo Pipes. http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/

And let's not forget the very useful and free, YQL http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#263

Post by danbeam »

Revisor wrote: post #216
nose wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are a few examples: http://trafficserver.apache.org/ http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/ http://github.com/yahoo http://yuilibrary.com http://developer.yahoo.com/yap/guide/caja-support.html http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/ http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/ http://developer.yahoo.com/hadoop/

And let's not forget the very useful and free Yahoo Pipes. http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/

And let's not forget the very useful and free Y! Connected TV http://connectedtv.yahoo.com/developer/

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#264

Post by barkingcat »

IdeaHamster wrote: post #103
pg wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know enough about what it's like inside Apple now to say. Certainly from what I've heard there used to be a hackerly culture in the past. I remember reading how mystified and offended Gil Amelio was by it. But I don't know what things are like now. Is there anyone here who can talk about it? Is the atmos hackerly or corporate?

It's a very hackerly culture (in some ways still living off the inheritance of Woz), but you won't ever hear about that for two reasons: 1. Secrecy is part of the culture. 2. Engineers work hard at Apple, and many teams are surprisingly small. There are no 20% projects at Apple because nobody has the time.

At Apple, Steve Job's 20% project takes up 100% of your time.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#265

Post by bpyne »

philwelch wrote: post #250
bpyne wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree 100%. Just adding: The "dictating specs to programmers" practice seems to stem from the silly notion of applying manufacturing processes to software development. In the view of companies with this notion, programmers are little more than unskilled translators - the parallel of line workers in manufacturing jargon. In my experience, one of the worst abusers of this "square peg/round hole" paradigm are internal I…

I may be wrong, but I was under the impression that practice stemmed largely from older days, when "programmers" were people who translated specifications into machine code or assembly, and programs were actually written and specified by higher ups--essentially, the day that programmers were more like human compilers than what programmers do today.

I can't speak to early computing, but starting around when business applications emerged (60's/early 70's?), developers were very involved in gathering requirements, designing, coding, testing, etc. Shortly after I entered the field, circa 1992, I started hearing about software development as an assembly line process. The developer role started being split: BA, architect, coder, sometimes a QA staff, etc. Whenever I've worked on projects with teams split out this way, it becomes a nightmare of communication overhead and miscommunicated requirements.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#267

Post by toddheasley »

spokey wrote: post #257
toddheasley wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I don't think it's a far cry to say Jobs is a consumer product hacker and a bit of a market hacker." Exactly. Apple isn't really about winning or losing; they're rewriting the game. Does it really get more "hackerly" than that?

I don't disagree with what you're saying, but I think we should be careful that "hacker" doesn't lose meaning altogether. This thread is coming close to defining "hacking" as simply "winning". That is, if it works, it's hackerly, if it doesn't, it isn't.

The winning/losing framing is from the essay itself. If anything, this thread is coming closer to defining "hacking" as not simply "writing code." The question is whether or not Apple has a hacker culture, since one could argue that, while Apple's software tends to be great, it's a byproduct of their obsession with beautiful products, rather than their singular focus. I'm suggesting that, if anything, the tendency on Hacker News is to define "hacking" as simply "writing code," whereas, I think it's more about the intent. You could argue, very easily, that Y Combinator is hacking venture capital -- or that Apple is hacking the entire ecosystem around their products.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#268

Post by btilly »

encoderer wrote: post #226
btilly wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Read Founders at Work. You'll find that the founders of Yahoo thought of it that way.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#269

Post by shalmanese »

encoderer wrote: post #225
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.

I've talked to people who currently work at twitter who are pretty open that a large part of their job is paying down the technical debt from the early days. The engineers who were at twitter in the early days were by no means bad but it's pretty open within the company that they weren't "world class"
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