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Yahoo Groups is closing down

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Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#51

Post by woofie11 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #23
kilroy123 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I think this will happen to Google. They seem to have lost their way.

It will only happen if competitors rise up and take over to be honest. I do believe that's doable for most of their services (they're losing a lot of market share to Office365 for their mail and office offerings), but services like search, advertising and translate, and purchases like youtube and android will take a lot longer. Not sure about Maps, I think that's still going strong even though I don't know about thei…

I think search will be quick. There isn't much stickiness there. It will be a disruptive S-curve, as soon as an upstart starts gaining traction.

Given how much of a cash cow that is for Google, I think when that happens, things will spiral. I'm not sure what this spiral will look like -- it's different for each company -- but an example:

* Revenue goes down.

* Beancounters at Google can't continue to offer $500k compensation, especially when so much of that are RSUs.

* A lot of top engineers company-wide leave for greener pastures. Worse decisions get made company-wide.

* Google finds it needs more money, and starts milking its customers more effectively. Data privacy goes down. Pricing goes up. Etc.

* Customers start to leave for free offerings from vendors with leaner cost structures.

... and so on.

I think a little bit of this kicked off when the qualified executives left. Schmidt/Larry/Sergey were quite good.

Fundamentally, though, Google seems brittle right now. It has a massive cost structure, which leaves them vulnerable (the problem isn't salaries; it's headcount). It's too big to be nimble. And it's not nearly as competent as it used to be. Or as it's competitors. Amazon and Apple are both more competent and more nimble.

Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#52

Post by vaccinator »

cinquemb wrote: post #11

How long will yahoo finance stay up?

Are they the only company to offer free historical stock trading data? Because I havent found any other... look here(0) for a mirror and a script to download an up-to-date dataset.

0. https://www.kaggle.com/jacksoncrow/stock-market-dataset

Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#53

Post by pgrote »

netcan wrote: post #45
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo is such a weird company in that it does so much yet it doesn't have the mindshare. Maybe it's a completely different generation still using it, I don't know.

Until they killed the comments section a few months ago, yahoo news (comments) seemed in the same league as a reddit or whatnot for a lot of news. There would be hundreds or thousands of posts on most daily news items. Yahoo slipped into a segment of invisible people. The volume is there, but the people are middle aged late adopters... very far from the cultural centre of gravity. They're affected by the conversation…

>Until they killed the comments section

Excellent take.

The comments were filled with additional information and there was a community. I understand why they got rid of them due to creeping toxicity, but they didn't even try to improve it before killing it.

Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#54

Post by mathattack »

swiley wrote: post #44

Why is it companies like Verizon buy companies like yahoo only to destroy the few things that made the company valuable? Is there some weird financial instrument that makes this profitable?

They bought it dirt cheap, not at Enterprise SaaS multiple. Companies with commodity pipes dream of owning the content running through them but it’s a very different business.

Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#55

Post by Tycho »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #22
gogopuppygogo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo isn’t a company anymore it’s a brand. It’s a death walk to insolvency at this point. They’ll extract whatever value they can before killing it.

Yahoo is such a weird company in that it does so much yet it doesn't have the mindshare. Maybe it's a completely different generation still using it, I don't know.

I've always used it as my homepage / page to check the news. It was an unpretentious news aggregator with a comments section where you could check to get the details which the articles neglected to mention.

Lately they've shut down the comments section most of the news is delivered via opinion pieces from HuffPost, Daily Best, The Independent, The Guardian. A great shame... not sure what a good replacement would be.

Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#56

Post by netcan »

pgrote wrote: post #53
netcan wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until they killed the comments section a few months ago, yahoo news (comments) seemed in the same league as a reddit or whatnot for a lot of news. There would be hundreds or thousands of posts on most daily news items. Yahoo slipped into a segment of invisible people. The volume is there, but the people are middle aged late adopters... very far from the cultural centre of gravity. They're affected by the conversation…

>Until they killed the comments section Excellent take. The comments were filled with additional information and there was a community. I understand why they got rid of them due to creeping toxicity, but they didn't even try to improve it before killing it.

Cheers.

Yahoo's business model is incoherent, so it's hard to make a coherent case for or against killing that comment section. Maybe there's no commercial value in owning a lower tier (in terms of cultural equity) discussion board.

Trying to reform an online community is a bastard of a task. What's the upside?

Anyway, its notable that a "social media" of that scale got killed, and most people who know about these things barely noticed. Journalists are on twitter. Their fiends are on fb. They check reddit, even 4chan to see what the fringes are saying. I doubt most journalists are even aware when their own article "blows up on Yahoo News." It's almost embarrassing.

I suspect that fb/zuck have an eye on this kind of thing though. They are massive, and mass is very valuable in the modern economy. But they have been migrating down the rungs of cultural equity... and Zuck knows this is dangerous.

FB started at harvard, then Ivey leagues, then colleges, then the world. We've seen this pattern multiple times. Get the important people, then get everyone. Tinder, Quora and others did this perfectly.

But... beware the "Yahoo effect." Move too low down the social ladder (for lack of a better term) and you become irrelevant. This effect killed friendster too, if you remember that far back.

Cool people have been receding on FB since day 1, and eventually it'll catch up to them. They'll have most of the people, but none of the influential people.

Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#57

Post by bpyne »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #22
gogopuppygogo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo isn’t a company anymore it’s a brand. It’s a death walk to insolvency at this point. They’ll extract whatever value they can before killing it.

Yahoo is such a weird company in that it does so much yet it doesn't have the mindshare. Maybe it's a completely different generation still using it, I don't know.

It's amazingly difficult to get away from. For those of us who had Yahoo email accounts, trying to get people to stop emailing them is a slow drawn out process. My wife and I switched to Gmail accounts at least 5 years ago. We still get friends and relatives sending to our Yahoo accounts. This, despite multiple requests to stop.

People seem to either reply all on old messages whenever they want to contact us or copy/paste email addresses from old messages, like invitations for Christmas parties, when they contact us. Either way we can't get away from Yahoo.

The other issue is companies using email addresses as user names. Just a few days ago, I went through Yelp to order a food delivery fulfilled by Grubhub. The order confirmation listed an old Yahoo account as the contact email. This was courtesy of Yelp using the Yahoo account as my login. Yelp provides a way to add an email address and make it the primary. Not all businesses do.

If I could snap my fingers and be done with Yahoo, I'd do it. I started to move us from it when Marissa Meyer was still CEO.

Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#58

Post by sarah180 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #22
gogopuppygogo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo isn’t a company anymore it’s a brand. It’s a death walk to insolvency at this point. They’ll extract whatever value they can before killing it.

Yahoo is such a weird company in that it does so much yet it doesn't have the mindshare. Maybe it's a completely different generation still using it, I don't know.

Yahoo! hasn't been a company for years. It's just part of Verizon's media group.

Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#59

Post by sarah180 »

swiley wrote: post #44

Why is it companies like Verizon buy companies like yahoo only to destroy the few things that made the company valuable? Is there some weird financial instrument that makes this profitable?

In 2015, the valuation of the company was $4 billion below the valuation of the Alibaba stock it held. A popular interpretation of this is that the main Yahoo! operations were considered to have negative value by investors—though the reality was a bit more complex than that.

Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#60

Post by bachmeier »

woofie11 wrote: post #51
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will only happen if competitors rise up and take over to be honest. I do believe that's doable for most of their services (they're losing a lot of market share to Office365 for their mail and office offerings), but services like search, advertising and translate, and purchases like youtube and android will take a lot longer. Not sure about Maps, I think that's still going strong even though I don't know about thei…

I think search will be quick. There isn't much stickiness there. It will be a disruptive S-curve, as soon as an upstart starts gaining traction. Given how much of a cash cow that is for Google, I think when that happens, things will spiral. I'm not sure what this spiral will look like -- it's different for each company -- but an example: * Revenue goes down. * Beancounters at Google can't continue to offer $500k comp…

> I think search will be quick. There isn't much stickiness there. It will be a disruptive S-curve, as soon as an upstart starts gaining traction.

It's unlikely that any other company will outcompete Google on search. What will happen is that something better than search will come along. That wouldn't be hard, given that today's search tends to return a combination of useless garbage and paid results. A better system will emerge - it has to, because what we have today is so bad.

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