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
What Happened to Yahoo
61–70 of 282 posts
Re: What Happened to Yahoo
#62Re: What Happened to Yahoo
#63Yahoo! is definitely not beyond being turned around, though it will take a huge effort.
Re: What Happened to Yahoo
#64Rich Yahoo in 1999 overlooked the value of search. Rich Google in 2004 overlooked the value of social networking (both their in-house hit Orkut and outside services).
And what will Facebook overlook? Maybe location? Was Facebook's failed acquisition of Foursquare like Yahoo's non acquisition of Google?
Privacy, perhaps.
Re: What Happened to Yahoo
#65Re: What Happened to Yahoo
#66"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.
That's a common impression but when it comes down to it HR's main capacity is to understand and deal with employment laws and regulations. HR will have zero to do with day-to-day interpersonal relationships and will typically only get involved in escalated issues which can't be handled solely by management.
Re: What Happened to Yahoo
#67[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.
[deleted]
Re: What Happened to Yahoo
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
No offense meant to the wonderful HR people who are no doubt out there, but from my experience HR people are good with: * Processes, procedures and forms * 401K, health insurance and other benefit programs * Buying salary surveys * Finding template bonus programs, performance evaluation programs and hire-a-friend programs. Adjusting them a bit to fit current organization. * Employment and immigration laws I've never…
Presuming you're from the US it seems that HR fills a somewhat different role over there. The people I know in HR in Denmark are very people oriented. the point remains the same though. I don't think hackers would be very good at processes, procedures and forms. Hackers create, this is administration.
I have always thought that in the US, HR people exist to protect the company from their employees. Make sure that things go correctly hiring and firing, to minimize the chance of lawsuits. Basically, they're company people and looking at them as anything else is a mistake.
If those in Denmark are people people, good for them!
Re: What Happened to Yahoo
#69I heared that when one of the large investment banks (forgot which one) got a new CEO, the first thing he did was stopping all IT outsourcing projects. He did realize a modern bank is, in fact, a software company, and you shouldn't outsource your core activity.
Sounds like Jamie Dimon, of JP Morgan Chase. He ended a multi-billion IT outsourcing deal with IBM in 2004:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/outsourcing/s...
Re: What Happened to Yahoo
#70I think there's something to be said for focusing on what the market rewards, and clearly the market wasn't rewarding yahoo for having great technology in 1998. Nor did it reward Google for having great enterprise search. You can't fault Jerry and David for not seeing search when the market had clearly supported banners with no basis for search as a viable model yet.
In 1998 the market was rewarding any and all comers with "dot-com" in their name, based on that and little else. It probably didn't matter much at all what Yahoo was doing or how they thought of themselves: they were one of the best-known .com companies at the time and that's all that really mattered.
Speaking as a veteran of a .com that had $30MM of venture money literally handed to them in 1999 for a concept. No customers, no proven ability to implement the concept, no management that had ever attempted anything like it, etc. The money was gone in a little over a year, frittered away on lavish offices, a huge support organization (for no customers!), massively overbuilt technology infrastructure using the most expensive Sun servers, Cisco networking gear, triple-redundant everything.
Very few tech companies, customers, or investors in that era had any real idea of what they were doing.