What Went Wrong At Yahoo

kjh1 writes "Paul Graham writes about what he felt went wrong at Yahoo. He has first-hand experience — his company, Viaweb, was bought by Yahoo and he worked there for a while. In a nutshell, he felt that Yahoo was too conflicted about whether they were a technology company or a media company. 'If anyone at Yahoo considered the idea that they should be a technology company, the next thought would have been that Microsoft would crush them.' This in part led to hiring bad programmers, or at least not going single-mindedly after the very best ones. They also lacked the 'hacker' culture that Google and Facebook still seem to have, and that is found in many startup tech companies. 'As long as customers were writing big checks for banner ads, it was hard to take search seriously. Google didn't have that to distract them.'"

Comments

Way to compete with MS

[oodaloop]

'If anyone at Yahoo considered the idea that they should be a technology company, the next thought would have been that Microsoft would crush them.' This in part led to hiring bad programmers

Did anyone else read this as, they hired lousy programmers so they could compete with Microsoft?

Re:Way to compete with MS

[somersault]

No.

Re:Way to compete with MS

[Dancindan84]

No. I read it as no one at Yahoo considering it a serious technology company because of a fear of taking on Microsoft, so they didn't bother hiring decent programmers.

Re:Way to compete with MS

[Culture20]

'If anyone at Yahoo considered the idea that they should be a technology company, the next thought would have been that Microsoft would crush them.' This in part led to hiring bad programmers

Did anyone else read this as, they hired lousy programmers so they could compete with Microsoft?

I read it as: Yahoo bought a Mary-Kay Pink colored car so that Microsoft wouldn't steal it if they had to park on the street.

Re:Way to compete with MS

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. I read it as, 'we're not going toe-to-toe with the big dogs, so lets cut some corners.'

Re:Way to compete with MS

[Anonymous Coward]

As a lousy programmer and ex-Yahoo employee, I can confirm this.

Re:Way to compete with MS

[Anonymous Coward]

'If anyone at Yahoo considered the idea that they should be a technology company, the next thought would have been that Microsoft would crush them.' This in part led to hiring bad programmers

Did anyone else read this as, they hired lousy programmers so they could compete with Microsoft?

Unfortunately they weren't incompetent enough.

Re:Way to compete with MS

[linuxiac]

Yahoo also fears any "anti-Microsoft" comments in their answers, or in comments! So, the filter is set to DELETE any account that mentions the *BSDs, GNU/Linux... Made it to 2990 points in Yahoo Answers, before one of my dozen + throw-away Yahoo accounts was tossed out, when I mentioned Linux Mint, in answer to a Linux question! But, I did get to mention "Plan 9 from Outer Space" without another of my throw-away Yahoo accounts being tossed out! Too bad the dummy Microsoft fanbois who program and frequent FreeBSD driven Yahoo, don't have a clue! Fun part is that there is NO arbitration, no recourse, to the draconian rule of Yahoo "M$derators"! Hey, Linux users read advertising, purchase consumer goods, run businesses, drive the economy! Too bad Yahoo doesn't really understand marketing!

Re:Way to compete with MS

[luis_a_espinal]

'If anyone at Yahoo considered the idea that they should be a technology company, the next thought would have been that Microsoft would crush them.' This in part led to hiring bad programmers

Did anyone else read this as, they hired lousy programmers so they could compete with Microsoft?

No. Only you did. In other words, your reading comprehension skills are a sad indictment of our education system.

Re:Way to compete with MS

[oodaloop]

Or I was just trying to be funny, and your lack of humor is a sad indictment on your lack of humor. Either way.

Re:Way to compete with MS

[Mantis8]

You're probably right. I worked for an outsourced company that did tech support for Yahoo - Merchant solutions (ecommerce) and Yahoo web hosting. The free sitebuilder program really sucked bad. It was written in Java, so I often had to deal with customers who just bought or built their own brand new, high-powered computer, only to have it drop to its knees after installing sitebuilder. It was extremely slow, and full of bugs. We regularly had extremely hostile customers call in and threaten us with everything under the sun. One customer even took down his own home page content and replaced it with a very ugly paragraph about how bad Yahoo is, in bolded, oversized text no less, and left it up there for several days. Another one called us incessantly for an entire day in a feeble attempt to tie up our phone system. Another customer threatened to find us (we weren't allowed to tell customers who we really were, nor what our true address was) and "take us out". I would look at a customer's home page that they just built using sitebuilder, then validate its html code, (http://validator.w3.org/), and it would literally have hundreds of errors in it. Just now, I validated www.yahoo.com, and the results are: 162 Errors, 33 warning(s) for "Errors found while checking this document as HTML 4.01 Strict!". Yahoo is a crappy tech company that doesn't eat their own dog food.

I read an article about Yahoo on their tenth anniversary. It bragged about how Yahoo's goal was to always remain profitable and that's why they were able to remain viable, while so many other internet companies went down. At first, I thought that was brilliant in a time when so many other companies were biting the dust because they wasted so much money. But then the reality of what their goals are really struck me - all they cared about was money, and not their customers who were paying them.

In the ecommerce dept, they bragged about having a $3 BILLION dollar annual revenue, but I regularly saw them screw their customers over big time. If a guys account/site couldn't be fixed at level 1 tech support, then they transferred the call up to tier II - standard procedure. But if tier II couldn't fix it, the ticket had to be escalated up to the engineering dept and woe unto them! It usually took 1 - 3 WEEKS to get it fixed!!! To the best of my knowledge, it is still that way. Even if the customers entire website was down, it didn't matter. I heard that they only had 2 or 3 engineers working there to fix thousands of escalated tickets. No wonder it took so long. The longer it took to fix, the more Yahoo would lose money because they made money by getting a percentage of the customer's sales, so if the customer's site was down, both of them lost money. On top of that, they would not even offer an apology, or reimburse the customer for their lost business. Some customers even went out of business because Yahoo took too long to fix a high priority issue. In contrast, one time I had my own site hosted by a local web hosting company selling some stuff, and I verified one morning that my site was down, and it wasn't my computer, internet connection, etc, so I sent in an email to tech support. In 2 minutes, I received an automated response acknowledging my issue and it informed me that some techs were working on the issue. In 15 minutes, I got another email from the techs themselves telling me more details about what went wrong and that they will have it fixed soon. In less than 3 hours, my site was back up and running! If a small web hosting company can do that, then a multi-billion dollar company can do that too, BUT THEY CHOSE NOT TO, so I don't feel sorry for Yahoo. They shot themselves in the foot.

Yahoo was only interested in grabbing more customers and not keeping the ones they had and they made some very stupid mistakes as a result. Like one time they had a web ad for their merchant solutions ecommerce, bragging about how good they were, but when you clicked on the link to see what customers h

Re:Way to compete with MS

[rockout]

Troll??? C'mon, he was obviously trying to be funny. I chuckled. Get a sense of humor, mods.

Re:Way to compete with MS

[LandGator]

> Even if the customers entire website was down, it didn't matter. I heard that they only had 2 or 3 engineers working there to fix thousands of escalated tickets.

You heard wrong. Lots more engineers working on e-commerce.

> In contrast, one time I had my own site hosted by a local web hosting company selling some stuff, and I verified one morning that my site was down, and it wasn't my computer, internet connection, etc, so I sent in an email to tech support. In 2 minutes, I received an automated response acknowledging my issue and it informed me that some techs were working on the issue. In 15 minutes, I got another email from the techs themselves telling me more details about what went wrong and that they will have it fixed soon. In less than 3 hours, my site was back up and running!

ONE Anecdote? I can recall many, many quick resolutions when I worked Y! e-commerce support. Come back with a statistically valid sample.

Re:Way to compete with MS

[Anonymous Coward]

Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
Result: 35 Errors, 2 warning(s)
Address: http://www.google.com/

After running through several well known sites, I have concluded: nothing can pass that validator's test I guess...

What went wrong?

[h4rm0ny]

Nothing "went wrong". Google happened. It's not complicated. To say what "went wrong" is like asking what went wrong in New Orleans when Katrina happened. Certainly with hindsight you can point out all the mistakes. Certainly you could say: "if we'd known...". But basically, and in a similar manner to Katrina, Google came and washed everything else away for a time.

Re:What went wrong?

[TheRealFixer]

Or, you could read the article, where he mentions his suggestion to the brass to buy Google in the late 90s, and Yahoo's complete disinterest in doing so because they considered the search business to be mostly irrelevant.

Re:What went wrong?

[gatzby3jr]

Now, I'm not meteorologist, but I think comparing Google to a hurricane is a piss poor comparison.

Google came to be because there was an opportunity in the market, and a very large one at that.

Saying that "Google happened" like it was some inevitable event pre-planned on the timeline of the Earth is a very poor reason for why Yahoo failed.

Yahoo, in every thing they've done has had the upper hand, and let it slip away. They grab a market, and fail to innovate beyond that. They get greedy with big checks from advertisers and can't see beyond that.

I've been watching it for years. Yahoo lets another one of its markets or products just slip away as they refuse to innovate, and let another company sweep in and take it away.

Re:What went wrong?

[bsDaemon]

So, when Google came along, people climbed onto the roof of Yahoo headquarters and waited for the government to bail them out?

But seriously... the problem for Yahoo, and a lot of other companies, is/was as stated in the summary: They don't know if they're technology companies or media companies. Yahoo, Google, etc, are basically ad agencies which use their free services to honeypot people into their advertising ecosystem. I think Yahoo knew it was a media company when people thought they were a technology company, but didn't realize people thought they were a tech company. Google seems to be playing the "oh, we're just an innocent tech company making cool innovations n' stuff" game better, and minimized the impact of their ads.

Consequently, Google has become an advertising and content behemoth while people are still going on and on about how cool their "products" are. It's fucking stupid.

Re:What went wrong?

[Buggz]

I disagree, I'd call failure to react properly to changing circumstances something that went wrong. Google didn't hit like a hurricane but grew steadily into a giant. Spending years hiring mediocre developers developing mediocre products and not being sure of the direction to take the company isn't exactly the business equivalent of a flash flood. I don't see any Yahoo executive saying "it all happened so fast, just *WHOOSH* all gone".

Re:What went wrong?

[Aladrin]

There were things done wrong in New Orleans before Katrina, like not having the flood walls up properly.

Similarly, Yahoo didn't prepare for a competitor to make a better search engine. Any business has to imagine that they will have a competitor.

They were both fat and happy and ignored any doom-saying.

Re:What went wrong?

[maxume]

I don't think the leadership at Google has any illusions about where the money comes from, but I think they also realize that they can use technology to save money (even just on servers), and to give themselves new places to sell ads.

Throw in the realization that there is little point in trying to be a mediocre technology company and their helter-skelter 'product strategy' fits right in.

Re:What went wrong?

[drinkypoo]

Nothing "went wrong". Google happened. It's not complicated. To say what "went wrong" is like asking what went wrong in New Orleans when Katrina happened.

So you mean what happened to Yahoo was that oversilting and other pollution of rivers damaged the coastline? I never would have guessed.

Re:What went wrong?

[h4rm0ny]

So you mean what happened to Yahoo was that oversilting and other pollution of rivers damaged the coastline? I never would have guessed.

How the Hell are all the sensible arguments pointing out problems or contentious issues in my post sitting around at Score: 1, and you've been modded up +5 for crass absurdity? Just how many accounts do you have?

Re:What went wrong?

[Servaas]

So if they had bought it we would have no Google, seeing as their completely disinterested in search. It's swell that Paul realised its potential though, and if only it wasn't for those rotten managers he would have gotten away with it!

Re:What went wrong?

[omar.sahal]

But basically, and in a similar manner to Katrina, Google came and washed everything else away for a time.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin must not have looked at it that way. They could see the answer, they had studied the problem of internet search and had found the solution. While Eric Schmidt knew how to monetize it. But your right it is easy to say with hind site look at the mistakes they made. They would have looked at the problem of Google being better. Looked at how, if they did the same thing they would threaten their revenue stream as (at the risk of stating the obvious) large companies would pay large sums to advertisers, to them its chump change, but to me and you its to large a pile of cash to compete with.

Re:What went wrong?

[ZeroExistenZ]

Google came to be because there was an opportunity in the market, and a very large one at that.

Oh really?

Do you remember the internet around that time?
We had AskJeeves, Astalavista, HotBot, Yahoo, Ilse and a pile of other searchengines. Google was one of the pile.

Later google released gmail. We had millions of online email providers, hotmail was really hot that time with MSN-chat integration and your profile page (taking a throw at MySpace)

Google did bring innovation in searchresults and found a way to neatly advertize. But most of its funtionality was very much already existing. They played the same game as alot of others at that time, but just slightly better.

Yahoo, in every thing they've done has had the upper hand, and let it slip away. They grab a market, and fail to innovate beyond that. They get greedy with big checks from advertisers and can't see beyond that.

Every large cooperation at a certain point starts to work profit driven and do get greedy in a sense. I doubt someone sat at Yahoo thinking "ok, this is slipping away", no they thought they were doing the thing generating the most profit.
Alot of older softwarehouses have a product, they (suits) milk it for years to come and just "innovate" as necessary, not beyond that.

Re:What went wrong?

[luis_a_espinal]

Google came to be because there was an opportunity in the market, and a very large one at that.

Oh really?

Do you remember the internet around that time?

Just because there were a bunch of search engines at the time, that doesn't mean that there wasn't a large opportunity on the search space that none one else did to the extend they did: For one, most of the contenders at the time were embedding their search engines in portals. Google did not. Secondly, and most importantly, the great opportunity that no one exploited until Google's time was the ranking of pages for the purpose of searching as opposed to textual indexing (be it with inverted or forward indexes.) The PageRank (tm) algorithm exploited a market opportunity that was there for the taking.

A market opportunity is not something that occurs because there aren't any competitors. It is *that* which is not done or not done well by your competitors, even if they exist by the millions.

Re:What went wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

Saying that "Google happened" like it was some inevitable event pre-planned on the timeline of the Earth is a very poor reason for why Yahoo failed.

Yahoo, in every thing they've done has had the upper hand, and let it slip away. They grab a market, and fail to innovate beyond that. They get greedy with big checks from advertisers and can't see beyond that.

Especially since Yahoo! was an initial investor in Google:

        http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3392781

I'm sure if they made a reasonable offer, they could have bought out Google in its nascent stages.

Re:What went wrong?

[Surt]

Well, Google was a good, but by no means unique idea. Had they been swallowed, one of their parallels would have filled the void.

Re:What went wrong?

[gatzby3jr]

Where do I begin with this one?

Competition is not equivalent to lack of opportunity.

Google saw an opportunity to make profits while still innovating in an already saturated market, making it all the more impressive that they've been this successful.

Later google released gmail. We had millions of online email providers, hotmail was really hot that time with MSN-chat integration and your profile page (taking a throw at MySpace)

I'm confused, you're saying that there were tons of companies like this, and then Google released a better product. That looks to me like an OPPORTUNITY that Google capitalized on. God didn't come down and say "oh here Google, take this Gmail product and bedazzle the world with its all-mightiness".

I doubt someone sat at Yahoo thinking "ok, this is slipping away", no they thought they were doing the thing generating the most profit.

I never said they had an all hands on meeting and voted on whether or not to let the email business slip away. That doesn't mean it didn't happen.

Every large cooperation at a certain point starts to work profit driven and do get greedy in a sense.

Every corporation is profit driven...that's why they're a corporation.

Their short sightedness (re: my original post) is what caused them to fail.

Their up front greed, caused them to fail.

Their lack of understanding, caused them to fail.

Should I keep going?

Re:What went wrong?

[Beetle B.]

To say what "went wrong" is like asking what went wrong in New Orleans when Katrina happened. Certainly with hindsight you can point out all the mistakes. Certainly you could say: "if we'd known..."

Except, of course, they did know.

10 months before Katrina, I was part of a geography competition (multiple choice). One question was: "Which of the following disasters which, if occurred, would be considered so damaging that the Red Cross refuses to have a permanent branch prepared for it?" The answer was a hurricane hitting St Louis (the other options were either really unlikely, or ones where the Red Cross did have a permanent branch associated with it.

When I went home that day, 10 months before Katrina, I looked up why that was. And so I knew. The Red Cross knew. They knew because many other people knew, including local officials. People had been warning about the scenario for years.

Re:What went wrong?

[mcgrew]

If you'll RTFA you'll see that Yahoo could have been the Google, but they fucked up.

Re:What went wrong?

[Junior J. Junior III]

Disagree; Graham has some useful insights if you bother to RTFA.

There's no insights or understanding in saying "Google happened". Understanding what was going on inside Yahoo! and Google at this time does provide useful insights.

My only fault for Graham's analysis of Yahoo!'s downfall is he fails to mention how poorly Yahoo treated end users of their services, and the end users of services that were acquired by Yahoo! I think this figures into it as well.

It's not just that Yahoo! had poor strategy and didn't hire the best programmers and were blinded by their business model at the time; Yahoo! also treated its users like cattle, screwed them repeatedly by changing not only ToS, but default profile preferences. They bought many really promising, cool web services and ruined them this way.

Re:What went wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an honest to god Yahoo! employee, so the coward goes without saying ...

Yahoo! does have a ton of good ideas, and over the years, has learned to snap up better and better people.

The problem that Yahoo! has had, and still has today, is that it doesn't know what it wants to be. And, as a result, does about a thousand different things simultaneously. Completely half-assed. They grab a certain idea or market, latch onto it, investing and innovating ... then suddenly, they stop thinking it is a priority, and they stop focusing on it. Low and behold, another company comes along, many of them sporting ex-Yahoo! employees or students that Yahoo! rejected, doing the exact same thing that Yahoo! is or was doing, only better or tweaking it, just a tad. It becomes a success, because its their sole focus, while the Yahoo! product falls even more by the wayside.

That is Yahoo! ... they half-ass everything they create, because some other new thing comes along and captures their interest. It makes Yahoo! a clusterfuck of products and services, technology and media; where one portion of a product works as intended but another interlocking piece is a huge pile. If you question that sentiment, look at their homepage. Host a site on Yahoo!. Use a paid product.

Yahoo! is a great way to point your parents, maybe your grandparents. Yahoo! has every opportunity to be a great company, even today. They just need to finish one product at a time, focus on one segment of the market per department, and honestly, honestly after all these years ... decide what kind of company they want to be.

I doubt it will ever happen without some change in the leadership of the company. The board of directors ... all old people, all business-focused, all seemingly lacking the spark of ingenuity. They have aged, they're old people who think they're hip, but really they're just unwilling to take risks or attempt the new. It shows in everything they do and every product they touch. I have hope for Bartz, she seems to have a good head on her shoulders ... but with Yang there, waiting in the shadows, still pulling the strings, Yahoo! seems doomed to fail.

Re:What went wrong?

[irix]

Do you remember the internet around that time?

Do You?

Yahoo was an index, not a search engine. Altavista (not Astalavista, we're not trying to find warez) was the best / most popular actual search engine became the provider of search results to Yahoo as early as 1996 - Yahoo was not in the search engine business they were in the portal / media business.

Altavista was popular because of its minimalist interface, and because their crawler was fast and indexed much more of the web than anyone else had at the time. What Google did was come along and provide the minimalist interface, crawled as much or more of the web but on top of that it gave results what were much much more relevant than Altavista, AskJeeves, etc. There was absolutely a market for a better search engine at the time and Google seized it, which is why they became so dominant so quickly - it was hardly "slightly better" - it was way way better.

Re:What went wrong?

[BabyDuckHat]

Thanks for the insights. I've never seen anyone so committed to using the "!" in the Yahoo name and I gotta say, it's really, really irritating.

Re:What went wrong?

[srk2040]

Greed, it's what makes us so human and not so human.

Re:What went wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it weren't for google, search may have remained in a pitiful state. I was using Yahoo, but the results were poor so I used sites like dogpile.com to aggregate the results from various different search engines to get the best results. Google's algorithm did it best of all of them... and did it with such a minimalist page, viewing where to click, enter data, and view results was *easy*.

Re:What went wrong?

[steelfood]

The key wasn't just searches though. They monetized in a way that was completely different.

Banner ads used to be the norm. They took forever to load (on a 56k modem which only ran at 53.3k anyway), popped up and got in the way, were everywhere, and didn't provide any value, but everybody accepted them as a fact of life.

Then Google came along, and suddenly, they weren't 500K pictures, but a few characters of text! And they usually sat there unassumingly, not trying to usurp your attention. And they were relevant too! When you searched for Tom Clancy's newest book you got ads that took you to where you could buy it!

Their genius was not just in providing decent search results (they weren't always the best at first--they were pretty reliable on average, but Altavista and often Yahoo came up with more relevant results), but also in not being absolute dicks when trying to make money off the page view. And that's why most people switched to Google.

Re:What went wrong?

[Dogtanian]

[Google's genius was] also in not being absolute dicks when trying to make money off the page view. And that's why most people switched to Google.

IIRC, I switched to Google not because they had better search results, but because I got sick of those obnoxious (and notorious) pop-up and pop-under ads for X10 cameras on Yahoo. (Remember those? The ones that seemed to imply you could use the cameras to spy^w keep an eye on on your teenage daughter's jailbait friends and the like? Not at all dodgy!)

Re:What went wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that, but you could swap in "Google" every time he says "Yahoo" and still be totally correct.

Re:What went wrong?

[lonecrow]

I concur. I remember reading their article in Scientific American about link analysis and I wished there was a way for to stay apprised of the activity in the future. Alas, there was no google alerts at the time.

I think it was about a year later that google appeared on the scene. I am not sure if it took a year from the publication in SA until they launched, or if it just took that long for me to notice them.

At any rate, there were not just one in a pile. There is probably chart somewhere showing the rise of google and the collapse of most of the rest.

Re:What went wrong?

[LandGator]

Would you please cite your source for the Red Cross willful unpreparedness?

Re:What went wrong?

[LandGator]

I ask because I find evidence the local chapter is prepared... and has become a model for at least one other large metro area:

Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal
Red Cross recruiting volunteers for Level 3 disaster response

{snip}
The chief criteria for making Level 3 is the number of volunteers trained to combat a major disaster... So far, St. Louis is the only Level 3 chapter in the Midwest.
Local chapters aren't required to lift themselves to Level 3{snip}
The (Minneapolis-St. Paul) chapter, which is modeling its effort off of St. Louis', already has begun meeting with city mayors and business leaders in its Get Ready in 2007 campaign.
According to St. Louis' estimates, costs to provide Red Cross disaster response for a Level 2 disaster are between $10,000 and $50,000, but a Level 3 response takes as much as $250,000.
Get Ready requires several steps.{snip}

The dollar figures above show the Red Cross direct relief expenditures in a disaster, not the losses of disaster clients, FYI.

Of course, history shows other risks are much more likely in St. Louis, such as
flood
http://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/re/articles/?id=1880
tornados http://www.usgennet.org/usa/mo/county/stlouis/weather/1927tornado.htm http://www.usgennet.org/usa/mo/county/stlouis/cyclone.htm
earthquake:

" Federal Emergency Management Agency warned that a serious earthquake in the New Madrid Seismic Zone could result in "the highest economic losses due to a natural disaster in the United States," further predicting "widespread and catastrophic" damage across Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and particularly Tennessee, where a 7.7 magnitude quake or greater would cause damage to tens of thousands of structures affecting water distribution, transportation systems, and other vital infrastructure." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Madrid_Seismic_Zone#Potential_for_future_earthquakes http://foxy955stl.com/national/jimgates/american-red-cross-offers-safety-tips-for-earthquakes/

and zombie attack http://www.riverfronttimes.com/2007-02-07/news/doomsday-disciples/full/-1/

Of course, Minneapolis has never prepared for hurricanes, nor has Detroit. Being far inland, over 600 miles inland, as is St. Louis, kinda reduces the risk of hurricanes, don'tcha think?

Also, preparing for one kind of emergency prepares one for most of the perils of other likely crises. Having a network of friends, knowing where to meet up if you can't get home, knowing who to call in emergency (since interstate long distance often works when local phone lines overload), preparing your house, keeping emergency money on hand (especially coins for payphones because cellphones are the first network to overload and fail in disaster) food and water on hand along with clothing and communications tools, knowing evac routes and where high ground is, all are applicable to multiple emergencies.

Lessons learned shows us learning the common skills and acquiring the commonly needed assets is the best investment of time and money, the core of the 'All Modes' preparedness approach sensible agencies apply to disaster preparedness.

Therefore, I must, again, ask for you to cite your source, and explain why a city six-hundred-miles inland _should_ prepare for a hurricane, when there are much more likely risks to consider.

 

Nothing went wrong at Yahoo

[syousef]

Nothing went wrong at Yahoo because Yahoo never had anything of value to sell. It was all Internet bubble hype. They had a semi-decent email offering and a web catalog. It's amazing they did as much as they did.

Re:Nothing went wrong at Yahoo

[elrous0]

Actually, their directory was very useful in the early days of the web. Back then, search algorithms sucked and their was nothing like Google around. You could go over to Alta Vista and type in "Independent Film" and get a bunch of sites back about independent contractors, film stock, etc. Yahoo was the only reliable way to consistently find good topic-oriented sites. So they WERE quite valuable in those early days, and could have (and, to some extent, did) make a lot of advertising money. The problem was that Google came along with its much improved searches, and Google's infrastructure wasn't nearly as labor-intensive as a human-edited web directory.

Re:Nothing went wrong at Yahoo

[edremy]

It was even more than that. Search engines didn't suck back in the day. Search engines *didn't exist* when Yahoo started.

I was a couple of buildings over from Filo and Yang in (chemistry) grad school back when this weird little program called Mosaic appeared. But it was a toy- you couldn't find information on it. You ended up posting lists of your bookmarks so that other people could find the neat stuff you did. Then we heard about these two guys over in Engineering that were collecting links and indexing them (by hand). It was great- finally a place where you could find literally thousands of organized web links as opposed to our crappy lists of a few dozen.

Yahoo's kind of seen as a pathetic loser these days by the "digital elite" but they had a massive effect on the early web

Re:Nothing went wrong at Yahoo

[drinkypoo]

In other words, the problem with Yahoo is that it didn't scale. Failure was designed in. If the internet succeeded then Yahoo had to fail. That is not a good business model. The problem with Yahoo was Yahoo. Business models based on limited success are stupid.

Re:Nothing went wrong at Yahoo

[cappp]

Ahhh directories - every lad of a certain age's favorite offering, made one hand surfing all the easier...just don't forget to clear the history.

Re:Nothing went wrong at Yahoo

[LWATCDR]

I actually like web directories for somethings.
Suppose you are thinking of moving. Or just want to find out about a town.
You could go to the directory and find all sorts of links to that things in that town or about that town.
Now I just Google the town and hope the chamber of commerce site doesn't suck.
Also search doesn't usually find new sites.
If you create a great site on a subject it will be a while before it shows up in the search ratings until other sites like to you and you rise in the rankings.
I still use my.yahoo as one of my home pages along with iGoogle which looks a lot like my.yahoo

To me Yahoo just got too cluttered. It became a bit of a mess. The good services are hard to find and those big banner ads drove me away "or to use adblockers".

Re:Nothing went wrong at Yahoo

[DerekLyons]

In other words, the problem with Yahoo is that it didn't scale. Failure was designed in. If the internet succeeded then Yahoo had to fail. That is not a good business model.

No, the problem with Yahoo was/is Google. Google serves/served up semi-garbage results very fast, while Yahoo served up very good results fairly slow - and one truism of the net is that the denizens thereof will eat almost anything, so long as it's fast.

Re:Nothing went wrong at Yahoo

[metamatic]

I think the real problem was that at some point, Yahoo decided to de-emphasize their search directory and turn themselves into a portal site, because that was the latest hyped-up trend.

First they started filling search directory results pages with unrelated crap to push their portal concept. Then they got rid of the search directory entirely, and I stopped visiting their site.

Could they have kept the directory working? Maybe. dmoz.org was an attempt to do so, but by that point everyone had come to rely on Google.

Re:Nothing went wrong at Yahoo

[kriston]

I think Webcrawler would disagree that search engines did not exist when Yahoo started.

Furthermore, Yahoo wasn't spidering until they licensed Inktomi in the late 1990s and eventually bought them outright in 2002.

Every little bit of history helps.

Re:Nothing went wrong at Yahoo

[Anonymous Coward]

No, their web directory sucked. If you were looking for FooWidget you could certainly drill down and find a list of providers but the best one(s) were usually not even on that list. I never could figure out the basis of inclusion - maybe payola or maybe something else but it certainly wasn't *relevance*. That's one difference between Google and Yahoo.

One might argue that due to technological constraints at the time they were doing the best they could and that was better than nothing but I'd disagree. They had the *pretense* of relevant results but never actually produced them - that is not better than nothing, IMO.

Re:Nothing went wrong at Yahoo

[fishbowl]

>It was even more than that. Search engines didn't suck back in the day. Search engines *didn't exist* when Yahoo started.

We Archie users can argue.

Re:Nothing went wrong at Yahoo

[drinkypoo]

No, the problem with Yahoo was/is Google. Google serves/served up semi-garbage results very fast, while Yahoo served up very good results fairly slow - and one truism of the net is that the denizens thereof will eat almost anything, so long as it's fast.

Look, I was making webpages before Google, before Altavista, before Hotbot. Yahoo was the only game in town. Crawlers were research projects. Back then the total number of interesting websites was very small, so a managed directory approach was viable. As the web grew, it became more dynamic, but Yahoo kept using the same old approach instead of crowdsourcing (the term hadn't yet been invented, but the idea had) ratings. Consequently, the amount of work they had to do kept increasing, where if crowdsourcing were used it could have remained nearly fixed.

Anyway, I used to be listed in Yahoo's directory, both my personal pages and the overall site for the house in which I and others lived (at the time, www.circus.com.) I ran the internet's largest archive of drinking games, which is still/again up on my site (same database) and the house was then notable for our geek culture, which you can now buy in a bubble pack at Hot Topic. So I well understand the value of Yahoo. But the simple truth is that a directory can only give you the barest overview of what is on a site. From a list of "blogs" where I would probably mention drinking games and diesel autos you have no way to know that I'm going to give you specifics of installing MioPocket 4.0 on Magellan 4050. del.icio.us provides a more meaningful "directory" of sites, where users generate user-meaningful metadata. That's as close to the Yahoo concept as you can reasonably get without becoming totally nonviable.

Google has an "I'm feeling lucky" button for a reason. I don't bother to use it because I WANT to see multiple results, but what I want is often the top result.

Re:Nothing went wrong at Yahoo

[TheRaven64]

The problem with the portal concept was the timing. I didn't switch to Google because they had better search results, I switched because portal-type pages took 10-30 second to load with my modem, but Google loaded almost instantly. A few years later this would not have been a problem - the difference between a tenth of a second and a second on a broadband connection is not important - but back on a modem it made browsing (sorry, 'surfing the world wide web') a lot faster.

The new user interface is one of the main reasons I stopped using Google as my default search engine (the privacy policy being the other) in favour of DuckDuckGo.

Re:Nothing went wrong at Yahoo

[Omestes]

. I never could figure out the basis of inclusion - maybe payola or maybe something else but it certainly wasn't *relevance*. That's one difference between Google and Yahoo.

You had to submit your site to them, or they had to discover it. Your site had to have merit to their team of editors (or whatever they were called). I remember being very happy that Yahoo decided to index my site, back in the mid-90's.

On one hand I rather miss Yahoo, and other indexers, which would hand sort through all the crap, and just keep the relevant information. General search is better, for most things, but having a small, limited, index is also nice for when you really don't feel like digging through 800 pages of SEO crap, and idiotic clones of popular pages (Ask.com, I'm looking at you).

Google has become pretty much worthless, of late. Too much crap. I was looking for ceiling fan reviews the other day, and most of the results page was the same, single, review posted over and over on various aggregator sites, which just grab product reviews from other sites. Also, the rise of "advice" sites have killed Google's usefulness. If I wanted some idiots advice, I wouldn't be searching for people smarter than me online.

Re:Nothing went wrong at Yahoo

[steelfood]

Well, it depends. According to Wikipedia, Mosaic was released in April '93, and Webcrawler went live in April '94. That means there's a full year in when GP's story can take place and still be factually correct.

Again according to Wikipedia, Jerry Yang and David Filo started Yahoo in January '94, so yeah, I think GP's is correct when he said search engines didn't exist when Yahoo began.

Either way, search engines certainly didn't get popular until Altavista came around, and then later Google which truly revolutionized the web.

Re:Nothing went wrong at Yahoo

[steelfood]

More likely, they failed to adapt. They kept collecting links and hand-ranking them.

On the other hand, Google did the link collecting automatically, and came up with some formulas to automatically rank them as well. They still ranked some sites by hand afterwards, but it wasn't nearly as involved.

Funny thing is, sites like Digg and Reddit are exactly like what Yahoo used to be, except they use their users to rank instead of an employee.

Re:Nothing went wrong at Yahoo

[edremy]

Well yeah, and personally I thought that this weird web thing had nothing going for it compared to the power USENET News.

This is why I'm still working for the man and Filo and Yang can take Scrooge McDuck baths in hundred dollar bills.

Re:Nothing went wrong at Yahoo

[edremy]

Yep, I remember quite well the actual dates- we got our first copies of Mosaic in December of 93 since it was almost exactly a year before I graduated. (And I wasn't impressed in the least- clunky, ugly, slow and with a fraction of the info I could get out of USENET and Archie.) One of the other grad students pointed us towards what would become Yahoo shortly after I got back from that break. If Webcrawler existed back then nobody I knew had ever heard of it.

Re:Nothing went wrong at Yahoo

[kriston]

In fact, I was talking about spidering, the automatic crawling of the web. This isn't something Yahoo was doing. Yahoo was creating a human-generated directory.

Re:Nothing went wrong at Yahoo

[syousef]

I use to love Altavista. Judging by the yoyo moderation on my post people like Yahoo more. *shrug* It's still the truth - Yahoo was just a directory.

Excellent Article

[Haedrian]

Found this to be a brilliantly written piece of work from someone who knows what he's saying.

Re:Excellent Article

[bleeware]

Hmm, I worked there for about 4 years. I found this piece to be simplistic at best. True, some of the software developed at Yahoo in the late 90's was lame and yes, Yahoo can't decide whether to be a media company or a tech company. Both are symptoms of leadership failure, not a root cause. --Bruce

I Remember

[techsoldaten]

I remember the days when Yahoo search was the only search engine you worried about (97 - 2001-ish).

This reads as a cautionary tale about being a first mover. You may be on top one day, but you are trading the flexibiltiy of a start up for predictable lines of revenue that may not last. There are times when it is better to let someone else go first and build your strategy around what they are doing wrong.

M

Re:I Remember

[Anonymous Coward]

What universe did you live in? There was a little thing AltaVista in that time period.

Re:I Remember

[pedantic bore]

It's OK to be a first mover, as long as you keep moving.

Re:I Remember

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember the days when Yahoo search was the only search engine you worried about (97 - 2001-ish).

Yahoo still had a search engine in 2001?

Re:I Remember

[Anonymous Coward]

What universe did you live in? There was a little thing AltaVista in that time period.

And before Alta Vista, there was webcrawler.

Bad programmers and bad designers

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo must have intentionally hired the worst designers they could find. Everything about that site is a cluttered mess.

Jerry Yang

[elrous0]

Not taking a $33/share buyout from MS, with Google snapping at your heals? But hey, you got to thumb your nose at the evil MS, right? Of course, it was at your shareholder's and company's expense.

Re:Jerry Yang

[drinkypoo]

Not taking a $33/share buyout from MS, with Google snapping at your heals? But hey, you got to thumb your nose at the evil MS, right? Of course, it was at your shareholder's and company's expense.

If you believe Microsoft is evil, or even if you just believe that they are a blight on the face of computing, then either you turn down their offer, or admit that you're a corporate whore who will do anything for money.

Re:Jerry Yang

[Raenex]

or admit that you're a corporate whore who will do anything for money

Yang should have admitted that then, because at first he was just demanding more money, and after Ballmer called his bluff, he tried to woo him back. Like the old joke, we've already established that Yang is a whore, the rest is just haggling over price.

Re:Jerry Yang

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, I remember when that happened. Everyone and their grandma went out and bought Yahoo stock
because they thought it was a sure thing and they would make some easy money. Then when the
deal fell through, they blamed Jerry Yang, rather than taking responsibility for their poor investment
choice.

Re:Jerry Yang

[r7]

thumb your nose at the evil MS

Either that or recognizing how quickly MS could kill a Silicon Valley company like Yahoo (as they did to GO).

No, I think Yahoo's real Achilles heel can be summed-up in two words: middle management. Well ok, four words: technically underqualified middle management. The low point was when one of these middle managers tried to switch the entire corporate email system to MS Exchange. While that was the lowest of their low points many others continue to be nearly as bad. Bottom-line is that middle managers are rarely held responsible, upper managers are too busy, and everyone is skilled at pretending to be over-committed (which many are) and afraid to do anything about it.

Great memories, though

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember when the WWW was still nascent back in the early/mid 90s. Yahoo was the premier destination for me - the one portal that was always in touch with what I wanted. Then came Excite and others.

Could it also be that the other companies mentioned are largely using Linux, which engenders a sort of "hacker" culture. Yahoo historically has been a BSD-centric company, and the BSD guys I know tend to be far more conservative and less "hackerish". I don't know if the platform has anything to do with it, but a lot of guys and girls that consider themselves hackers tend to be in the Linnux camp. I could be off base here, but I think the underlying toolsets engender a certain mindset among those users.

Re:Great memories, though

[mikael_j]

I know plenty of BSD guys who are very much "hackerish" and consider themselves hackers, they just tend to be a bit more picky about things working properly. Yeah, I remember the late 90s as those dark days when every other app I downloaded wouldn't compile or run because it was written under the assumption that every *nix was just like x86 Linux in every way, and when the devs wouldn't even accept patches to fix their apps because it wasn't a problem for them that did breed a bit of resentment toward the average Linux application developer...

Customers

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is good (well, at least okay) at treating both AdSense and AdWords users as partners instead of someone that just are forced to deal with. Yahoo on the other hand, treated YPN users (the FEW that it let in to its infinite beta test) as criminals who were just looking for ways to screw Yahoo over. Instead of building a critical mass, it built nothing. Yahoo also was even worse than Google in communications with opposite messages 4-8 weeks apart in many cases. In short, a place that no one wanted to deal with and no one who had half a brain would deal with if they wanted stability for their business. There were high hopes for Yahoo, but it was NOT just a case of "Google came along" but a case of "Google came along and Yahoo royally screwed up."

Google is headed that way with many of its recent "evil" disclosures (WiFi, China until recently) etc but so far they are doing a much better job than Yahoo did.

Facebook

[Danieljury3]

Correct me if I'm wrong but what "hacker" culture does facebook have. Somehow I can't connect social networking and stupid flash games to "hacker" culture.

Re:Facebook

[Tei]

For once, "not fear of changes". Something that user *****HATE***** is changes, Facebook suffer lots of changes, some bad, some good, on the long term is better for everyone. Is exactly the same changes you may expect on a service labeles "BETA", withouth the label. Facebook is running somewhat like how Gmail is running, always testing new changes and enhancements.

Note: I *****HATE***** the latest changes in gmail :-)

Re:Facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you calling my l337 sheep-clicking skillz into question?

Re:Facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

They mean the employee culture, not the user culture.

Re:Facebook

[Junior J. Junior III]

I don't really think so, but perhaps he was referring to the tendency of Facebook to disregard boundaries with regard to sensitive information. That would make some sense...

I think more likely he's talking about their corporate culture -- lack of hierarchy, just getting things done, not needing or asking for authorization before you do something cool that you thought of 5 minutes ago, that kind of thing.

Re:Facebook

[rhizome]

Correct me if I'm wrong but what "hacker" culture does facebook have.

Well, in addition to having oldschool keyboards that still have question marks, Facebook employees have an example of hacker culture in releasing their HipHop PHP runtime to the world.

Re:Facebook

[blhack]

Somehow I can't connect social networking and stupid flash games to "hacker" culture.

Facebook invented Cassandra, as well as Haystack

Here is their engineering page.

Facebook *has* to be a culture of hackers as they really are pushing the limits of scaling (in the same way that google is)

Re:Facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

Facebook doesn't scale.

They need something like 1 server for 250 users or so.

Is it the laughably bad PHP?

Is it the incompetence of Facebook devs?

A mix of both?

Re:Facebook

[blhack]

Facebook has 1 server per about 10,000 users. (Although the majority of these are probably part of storage arrays)

Oh Yahoo

[js3]

The only thing I remember about yahoo was back in 1995-96 when it was nothing but a single webpage with lots of links maintained by some chinese guy. Essentially that's what it remains..

Re:Oh Yahoo

[DerekLyons]

The only thing I remember about yahoo was back in 1995-96 when it was nothing but a single webpage with lots of links maintained by some chinese guy. Essentially that's what it remains..

  Oh, really? You, and the folks who modded you up, need to get over your prejudices and get out more.
 
Yahoo is a lot more than just links - and is the primary reason why Google has added Gmail, iGoogle, News... and all the other things that aren't search.

Media vs Tech

[AnonymousClown]

If you walked around their offices, it seemed like a software company. The cubicles were full of programmers writing code, product managers thinking about feature lists and ship dates, support people (yes, there were actually support people) telling users to restart their browsers, and so on, just like a software company. So why did they call themselves a media company?

You'd see the same thing at an insurance company, auto company, or any large company that has large in-house development department. And yet, they're not conflicted about if they're a tech company or an insurance company.

Here's a hint on how to decide. How are your revenues generated?

Sell software, hardware, algorithms? Tech company.

Sell advertising? Media company.

Yahoo! Is a media company and so is Google.

It's not rocket science.

Re:Media vs Tech

[sorak]

I think you just shifted attention away from the real question:

What area should they focus the most resources on? Should they hire the best developers to start working on the "Y!phone", or should they concentrate on coming up with news content, tweaking and maintain the chat rooms, and to creating contests and gimmicks to sell more ad impressions? It looks like they went mostly in the later direction, so I guess you're right about them being a media company.

Re:Media vs Tech

[Anonymous Coward]

You've just made the same mistake Yahoo did. Both Yahoo and Google are ad supported tech companies. If they don't have relevant technology, they go out of business. They don't own media that they can sit around and collect money off of.

Re:Media vs Tech

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, yeah, but in that sense you can argue that Ford is the same as a company that makes horse buggies.

Google & Yahoo massively disrupted traditional media, and they did it with technology. Media companies focus on content. For traditional media companies, disruption is the emergence of reality shows.

Re:Media vs Tech

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually Google is a spyware company.

Its software exists solely to catalog you.

It does not believe in opt-in.

They are no better than doubleclick.

Switch to Google

[jgtg32a]

I remember switching to Google back in the day (28.8) and it wasn't because Google was giving better results it was because the Google page would load substantially faster than the Yahoo page.

Re:Switch to Google

[Haedrian]

That''s what actually made google the most popular.

You had competitors who were cramming all they could into a page - then google came out with their "Banner + two buttons" and that was it.

I used to use Altavista before.

Re:Switch to Google

[L4t3r4lu5]

I used HotBot.

Then again, I used HotDog Stand as a windows colour scheme. I now only see in greyscale.

Re:Switch to Google

[alen]

that was because wall street was telling everyone to become an internet portal and crap the homepage with crap to try to get people to stay longer than 10 seconds

Re:Switch to Google

[Anonymous Coward]

I was using yahoo and I switched over to google because google was highlighting the search terms in the results page with colors. At that time you had to click on "cached" to see that. In 2010, 10 years later, it is still exactly the same.

Re:Switch to Google

[Raenex]

The interface was a huge improvement, but so were there search results.

I used to use Altavista before.

So did I. I remember looking through pages and pages of AltaVista search results hoping to find what I was looking for. After using Google for a while, I rarely had to look past the first page.

I also used to use Yahoo as a directory service when I wasn't looking for something more specific with AltaVista. Google took over that too.

Yahoo! *didn't have* their own search-engine

[Rozzin]

What universe did you live in? There was a little thing AltaVista in that time period.

Indeed: as I recall, the `Yahoo! search-engine' *was* AltaVista (with Yahoo! decorations, but a little "powered by AltaVista" footnote at the bottom)--at least at some point; I think there were different back-ends that they used at different points.... Yahoo! may have actually done their own thing for the last few years, but only for the last few years.

Re:Yahoo! *didn't have* their own search-engine

[pinkushun]

That would have been around 2003:

In February 2003, AltaVista was bought by Overture Services, Inc.[10] In July 2003, Overture itself was taken over by Yahoo!.[11]

ref

However it's interesting to go back in time and look at altavista.com and yahoo.com :)

Re:Yahoo! *didn't have* their own search-engine

[Eil]

In the beginning, Yahoo had human editors scouring what little there was of the web and placing links to interesting sites in their heirarchy. This worked when the web was very small. (Yahoo's predecessors were those big thick Internet Yellowpages books.) When this failed to scale, they tried making their own web crawler and search engine. That didn't work out either, so they outsourced their web search to Alta Vista.

The only thing that Yahoo has done well since its beginning is convince people to use them for their web browser's home page.

Re:Yahoo! *didn't have* their own search-engine

[Animats]

AltaVista wasn't even started as a business. It was a demo for DEC Alpha machines, one of the first big systems built from huge numbers of rackmount machines interconnected by local area networks. Before that, most big data centers were built around mainframes.

AltaVista was originally installed in an old Pacific Telephone building in Palo Alto, a few blocks from DEC's research center. Because the building was built for rows of racks and cable trays, their data center was set up like a phone central office, with aisles of open racks bolted to the floor and cable trays above. At the time (1995) the typical data center had cabinets sitting on raised floors. In many ways, AltaVista set the pattern for the next fifteen years of computing.

From what I gather...

[Anonymous Coward]

...Paul Graham is the ESR of the "Lisp Community." Comments?

Also, Arc is the Daikatana of dialects

Re:From what I gather...

[TheRaven64]

No, unlike ESR, Paul Graham is actually right quite often.

Re:From what I gather...

[n1ywb]

I don't know, but having used Yahoo Store, I think one of their mistakes was buying it from Viaweb.

The problem is who bought yahoo...

[Ex-MislTech]

Yahoo was bought by Southwestern Bell, a family member of mine worked
for them for over 20 years.

The "suits" for the most part did not understand field operations,
and so the ppl making the big picture decisions did not understand
some of the key things going on in the field.

When the field techs tried to get the info to them they were basically ignored.

Alot of US companies go thru this, its nicknamed the Ivory Tower theory.

Southwestern Bell acts like the ATT of old, and now that ATT bought
all the Bells back up Yahoo is effectively owned by ATT.

So for me the bloated entrenched top heavy mega-corp is a slow
and cumbersome dinosaur with ppl at the top that liken themselves
to a Noveau Royalty.

Start ups will continue to out pace and out think them.

The means and methods will continue to be MBA group-think
while the upper crufties will look down there noses at those
who don't wear a suit and have short uniform hair.

Re:The problem is who bought yahoo...

[DoofusOfDeath]

The means and methods will continue to be MBA group-think while the upper crufties will look down there noses at those
who don't wear a suit and have short uniform hair.

Yes, but they'll actually be looking down from 10,000 feet in their company-owned Gulfstream jets.

You might think those people are incompetent, self-important douches, but by some measures they're doing something right.

Re:The problem is who bought yahoo...

[Rockoon]

Just to be accurate here, ATT was the one that got bought out.

SBC acquired ATT in 2005, and to prove that they did it just for the name, they re-branded themselves as ATT.

Re:The problem is who bought yahoo...

[PitaBred]

The only thing they're doing right is bleeding money from the people at the bottom and funneling it into the fuel tanks of their Gulfstreams.

Re:The problem is who bought yahoo...

[frank_adrian314159]

The only thing they're doing right is bleeding money from the people at the bottom and funneling it into the fuel tanks of their Gulfstreams.

It's a consequence capitalism. Anyone who can convince someone that they'll be better off with something than without and sell something (themselves, even) will make more money than someone who can only make things. Long term? There is no long term. Make enough money in the short term and who cares.

Re:The problem is who bought yahoo...

[Anonymous Coward]

Typically, what they're doing right is being born into the right families.

What Went Wrong At Yahoo

[omar.sahal]

Bellow is an email I sent to Paul Graham
Hi

In the article "what happened to Yahoo" http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html you said

There's not much we can learn from Yahoo's first fatal flaw. It's probably too much to hope any company could avoid being damaged by depending on a bogus source of revenue.

At the risk of saying the obvious if Yahoo had been looking to please the consumer, and solve a problem that they were having (in regards to finding information on the internet) they could have avoided bogus sources of revenue. Media companies have a split business model where consumers (the people buying the goods) and customers (those providing the revenue, the advertiser) are different groups. Perhaps they should have looked at pleasing the consumer, as there is no business if the media company has no eye balls to distribute adverts to.

Regards Omar

I can't post the replies as I have only just asked permission.

Re:What Went Wrong At Yahoo

[Mongoose Disciple]

At the risk of saying the obvious if Yahoo had been looking to please the consumer, and solve a problem that they were having (in regards to finding information on the internet) they could have avoided bogus sources of revenue.

I'd tweak that a bit: they should have taken the bogus revenue, but been wise enough to plan ahead for when it dries up instead of assuming it would continue indefinitely.

If someone wants to pay you $100 for something that's worth $1, by all means take it -- but also understand that, one way or another, that won't continue forever.

Better service, customer loyalty, and management

[Rivalz]

Service
1) when google came out and I first heard of it I thought wow what a silly name.
2) I got past the name and tried it to see how it was different.
3) It was immediately obvious it was better compared to yahoo.
4) I stopped using yahoo and other search engines immediately.

Customer Loyalty
1) I told my friends and family about google (I rarely suggest anything)
2) I've had issues with some things google has done over the years but nothing major enough. (I dont use chrome all that much because I don't see it as a far superior product compared to firefox. At least not in terms of Google vs Yahoo when it first gained popularity)
3) They've built up a certain level of trust that I don't associate with many companies.

Management
1) I wouldn't go as far to say they are charismatic but I would say they have a ideology that appeals to some people that could make a lot of money without the help of google but still decide to work for the company.
2) I've used their service and I'm a loyal customer but the only thing I have to go on for their management is what I can infer from news. But I still think management was a key part to their success.

Other victims?

[Anonymous Coward]

How were they to know that Netscape would turn out to be Microsoft's last victim?
Who were the other victims? Were there any others at all?

You keep getting it wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is surprising how many /.ers keep repeating the nonsense about Goole being an Ad agency.

Are ABC, NBC (SKY, ITV and others in the UK) ad agencies? No, of course not, they arent. They are TV companies that support their broadcasting activities by means of advertising, and obtain a healthy profit at times for it, but they do not organize the advertising campaigns of anybody, they just sell slots of time according to demand in order to make money.

Google is a tech company, they study the data, and increasingly the metadata, and the interaction of people with them, arrive to conclussions, and monetize that knowledge.

Advertisements are one way to monetize that knowledge, but there are so many other ways to take advntage of it that it is scary.

A proper advertisement agency will provide a complete package about how to present a given product and will organize a campaign for you. Google by no means does that.

But go on, keep repeating this nonsense, it is a meme that clearly is sticking around here.

Re:You keep getting it wrong.

[Surt]

They are not ad agencies in the sense of creating ads, no. But the business is run by the advertising side in both cases. That is, if you cross the ads people, you get fired, not them. They decide on the tone of reporting, content of shows, etc. They get approval power over basically everything. If you don't think that's the reality ... well ... go work for any one of them for a time.

Re:You keep getting it wrong.

[locallyunscene]

It is surprising how many /.ers keep repeating the nonsense about Goole being an Ad agency.

Are ABC, NBC (SKY, ITV and others in the UK) ad agencies?

The state of media being what it is, yes ABC, NBC, FOX, etc are ad agencies. When(if) they start doing journalism again I'll consider them more than that.

Re:You keep getting it wrong.

[NetNed]

Have to agree. The NBC affiliate here uses every opportunity to put infomercials on, even trumping regular national programing some times. They also sensationalize every news story they can and break in to regular programing with even the stupidest, non-issue "newsflash" headlines that most times are things I can wait on hearing.

Add to that the severe weather updates that they break in for when they already have a map covering a quarter of the screen during regular programing, yet they still go to ads during this "create some fear" weather reporting. And what happens when they go to ads? The little weather map disappears. Guess it's severe enough to wreak whatever I was watching, but not so bad as to stop them from forcing every ad they can on to my TV.

Re:You keep getting it wrong.

[fishbowl]

>The NBC affiliate here uses every opportunity to put infomercials on

There are people "here", dumb enough to be persuaded by infomercials.

I see a bigger problem than just "media companies."

Re:You keep getting it wrong.

[CannonballHead]

They are an ad agency because of revenue, not because of what they do. Were it not for ads, they would not be a profitable company and they would not be able to do as much as they do because they would have no money.

Re:You keep getting it wrong.

[steelfood]

Media companies != journalists.

Media companies include publishing companies (books, newspapers, magazines, etc.), broadcasting companies (radio, TV, etc.), production companies (film, music, theater, etc.). Just because they may have news shows, or have publications that purportedly contains facts, does not automatically mean the company does nothing but journalism.

Re:You keep getting it wrong.

[Wyvern2005]

Umm.. hate to say this, but hon, you are an optimist. At least in America-basic broadcast info is supposed to be something folks can get to all the time..and the only place I know that does that is PBS. I respect Google for throwing some of the goodies out there, there are so few companies that do. If net neutrality falls apart we aren't totally screwed, but it will be gettin' close...
  Honestly, ya have to leave people some space to LIVE in...we are not all about ad agencies..

Re:You keep getting it wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Spyware company is much more accurate.

Re:Search Algorithms

[TaoPhoenix]

Advanced Search.

The "boring" search box stopped being useful to me ... in 1998.
I have had a link to Yahoo Advanced search close by on my home jump-pages. Then you just type your phrase in the second line which is "this exact phrase". If you want "Independent Film" ... you got "Independent Film" plus some weirdly wildcard SEO'ed pages.

Lately I have found a use for Yahoo as an Anti-Google in the Privacy Wars. I am still just fine with my Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Advanced Search, and a couple of other Yahoo items.

Only this year have I begun to check some Google Search pages, but only if the Yahoo Search sinks.

Where they went wrong

[3ryon]

Probably none of you youngsters remember this, but Yahoo! initially didn't do search as much as handmade lists of interesting sites. To make it into their search results your page would be evaluated by a member of their staff. Talk about quality control! In a sense it was an early, massive, blog. I'm not saying that it's a good business model but it was good for the end users. They went away from that model and to spidering the web like all their competitors. Ten years later they're on life support. Coincidence?

Now Get off my lawn!

Re:Where they went wrong

[buck-yar]

Not entirely accurate. I had a website up in 1996 and it worked like this. Yahoo used a faceted browse, similar to ebay's organization. If you wanted your site on yahoo, you'd go to a form on the site and submit your url, what descrition you wanted, and what category it would go under. The "QC" you talk about was just making sure it wasn't spam and was in the correct category.

They didn't select good site and reject bad ones. You could tell this because there were some pretty terrible websites up at the time.

Re: Keep Moving

[TaoPhoenix]

Western Religion seems to have a problem with this.

That's why the eastern ones are so much more fluid.

what went wrong? The investment bankers came along

[alen]

i remember the early days of the internet. i remember the days before Internet Explorer when you had to buy a browser at retail and it was something called Internet in a Box.

I remember the days when Yahoo was king of search. it had a cool name, the results were pretty good and for whatever reason it gained mind share from the other 20 or so search engines around at the time. back then everything was on internet time and wall street analysts thought they knew everything and it was right after Yahoo's IPO. Wall Street decided that search was dead and the next thing was the Internet Portal where people would spend more time and see more ads. So Wall Street told Yahoo to expand or see it's stock punished. then of course wall street needed to peddle the worthless stocks of all the dot coms they sold and they needed suckers to buy companies like broadcast.com.

I bet the investment banks made a fortune on naive kids like Yang by first taking worthless dot coms public, charging huge investment banking consulting fees to find worthless companies to merge with, and then more money to arrange the sale of these worthless companies.

Yahoo made the classic mistake of buying a lot of properties or getting into a lot of different areas and not staying focused and letting the code fragment. or just being a middle man in reselling content.

Just like Microsoft. some VP starts a project like the Kin or the Zune and the rest of the company doesn't want to support it so it's a pariah project that doesn't work with other products the company is making. or it competes with other products.

Look at Apple, they sell two OS's. OS X and iOS and several minor variations of each depending on the device you buy. and iOS is essentially OS X Lite.

Google was just a search engine when wall street was telling everyone to be an internet portal. and they were making money on it. then they expanded into Gmail and other areas with the original business still being key. they took Apple's and Microsoft's strategy or releasing a beta product but with the features that a lot of people wanted to work better than the competition. and finish it later.

buh?

[drinkypoo]

did you miss? or just misinterpret comment scoring based on relationship?

Re:buh?

[h4rm0ny]

did you miss? or just misinterpret comment scoring based on relationship?

And low and behold the 1 line post above gets another +5.

Re:buh?

[drinkypoo]

If you can't figure out your comment score modifiers, which you can change in preferences, I am going to have to unfriend you :p

Hint: Part of my comment score is because you have willingly set yourself as my fan...

Re:Offtopic - Sig

[TaoPhoenix]

Offtopic,

I'm getting a Not Found for your sig link.

Well...

[ITBurnout]

What do you expect from a company with a bunch of Yahoos running it?

Seriously, though, they just made a combination of bad choices, or in some cases no choices (indecisiveness about what the company should be). A common scenario in companies that rise and fall as Yahoo did. I remember reading many years back that Yahoo headquarters had whimsically named its conference rooms things like "Decisive," "Competent, and "Sane," just so they could say things like "Anyone know where Paul is?" "Yeah, he's in Competent...he's in Decisive...etc."

My favorite

[Anonymous Coward]

My favorite back in the day was wherethehell.com. It actually gave good results too.

I was sad when it stopped being a search engine.

Re:My favorite

[lennier1]

In my case it was alltheweb.com which always got me the best results.
But when their system was gutted and replaced with Overture/Yahoo I abandoned it since that change had made it pretty much useless.

Re:My favorite

[eulernet]

I used Copernic at the time. It was a program which searched over all the existing search engines, sorting the results by relevance. It was very cool then.

Sloppiness, Bad Design, Wussiness

[gestalt_n_pepper]

Yahoo news stories used to universally take comments from readers. They were actually early with this, but then they cut it off. Fear of lawsuits is all I can think of. Now almost every news outlet on the web lets you comment on the stories. The legal staff and management at Yahoo simply hadn't the balls for even the slightest amount of risk.

They've also become the poster child of bad web design. The mail login goes through changes every month. They're not an improvement. Currently, you load 3 pages of noise filled unread ad droppings before you can actually log in and look at your mail. They used to have an easy to use weather and TV Guide. The were changed from simple, usable HTML pages to automated, advertising filled junk that made them almost unusable. Then they didn't measure the amount of use after the changes and modify accordingly. In fact, I doubt if they pay significant attention to users at all.

And they're just *sloppy.* I don't know how else to describe a company of that size that can't even keep its comic pages updated consistently.

Google, in contrast, has a clean look, usability and no ad droppings randomly scattered on pages.

And they have one more thing. Success.

Re:Sloppiness, Bad Design, Wussiness

[0123456]

Currently, you load 3 pages of noise filled unread ad droppings before you can actually log in and look at your mail.

Strange: I just type 'mail.yahoo.com', log in and I'm there.

Re:Sloppiness, Bad Design, Wussiness

[gestalt_n_pepper]

Yes, you log in once and as long as your browser is up, the next login is faster. Logging in from scratch using slower DSL gets you an empty page. After you start typing, it gives you the next page with a few graphics (deleting your text), and then finally gives you the final graphics laden pages with Yahoo gal or guy who can take 20 seconds to a minute to load depending on connection speed and general internet weather.

The deal is, 3 separate pages aren't *needed* and you can't depend on the fact that everyone in the universe has fast broadband. At my lake house, I've got a satellite system. It's relatively slow and Yahoo mail becomes an exercise in patience/torture.

Re:Sloppiness, Bad Design, Wussiness

[istartedi]

There are still parts of Yahoo that take comments. The trouble is, it's not moderated or filtered in any decent way. As flawed as Slashdot's moderation system can be, at least it has one.

I will certainly concede that they suffer from a serious case of what I call being "Deja'd". I started calling it that after Deja News (remember that?) updated their web site with bells and whistles, essentially destroying the utility for me.

The saving grace of Yahoo (and why I still use it) is that they don't kill off the old UI. I guess there are just enough grouchy old curmudgeons like me to make it worthwhile. You never know when the axe might fall though. Yahoo mail "Classic" could disappear any day, and when it does I'll probably go Gmail. It'll be a sad end to something like a 10 year run if that happens.

Re:Sloppiness, Bad Design, Wussiness

[gestalt_n_pepper]

Minor correction. There are still parts of Yahoo that take recently have begun to take comments. I've noticed the return and it's fairly recent.

"The trouble is, it's not moderated or filtered in any decent way."

Actually, that's what I *liked* about it. As vile, stupid and depressing as all those comments were, they were an honest reflection of homo computeris, not some filtered, sanitized, disney-fied, fluffy-bunny collection of happy-talk.

Re:Sloppiness, Bad Design, Wussiness

[Anonymous Coward]

I still remember when Yahoo bought GeoCities, which quickly became YahooShitties for me. They ate GC and removed everything from it that made it what it was, because they wanted to Yahooize it. Where before I could log into a chat room and get some halfway-decent conversation, they suddenly had ugly Java chat with absolute morons. I had a nice geocities email address that suddenly became some variation on foobar.geo@yahoo.com. Everything was slow, everything was ugly, and nothing ever managed to do what it was supposed to do.

Oh, wait, isn't that Yahoo now, too?

Re:Sloppiness, Bad Design, Wussiness

[Dogtanian]

I started calling it that after Deja News (remember that?) updated their web site with bells and whistles, essentially destroying the utility for me.

I remember that- it was when they changed their name to deja.com and I remember thinking of it as "Deja Fruit Machine" thanks to all the extraneous blinking rubbish on each side.

I couldn't have told you from memory alone specifically what it was they were trying to be, but I do remember it was quite clear they were trying to be more portalish, to the detriment of their original purpose- according to WP, they were focusing more on being a shopping comparison site.

The real product of Google

[cbraescu1]

A proper advertisement agency will provide a complete package about how to present a given product and will organize a campaign for you. Google by no means does that.

You seem to ignore the fact that we (the users) are the real product of Google, which truly makes it an ad company.

As for organizing the campaign, they automated that part for AdWords customers.

What went wrong at yahoo:

[fyngyrz]

Simple: They had a marvelous tree of web sites, arranged so you could browse them by interest. I used it constantly. Then they stopped updating that, and finally abandoned it, and became useless. Eventually they used cash to buy things that were useful, like flickr, and so technically now have some merit again, but it is certainly not the usefulness they originally had. Which, I might add, search engines like Google really don't replace at all. Google's listings often do a terrible job of putting the actual relevant content first; Yahoo's tree typically had sites right where they needed to be.

But... WTF is Yahoo today? An aggregator of low-resolution pop culture? A venture capitalist? What? Why would I go there? I just did go there, and looking at the sidebar, can choose horoscopes, OMG!, dating... I see some cheesy sound-bite versions of news stories... there's a list of "trending" (which is pop culture nonsense)... really, I have no idea why I would spend more than ten seconds there after seeing the home page.

Re:What went wrong at yahoo:

[Anonymous Coward]

there's a list of "trending" (which is pop culture nonsense)...

While we're at it...

1) go to mail.yahoo.com (classic mail, not the "new and improved" one) with Javascript disabled, running Firefox 3.x
2) Log in
3) Observe the screen refreshing itself infinitely until you get a "999" error - Y!'s way of protecting itself from a perceived DOS attack.

I suspect, but can't prove, that the "Trending" banner is part of the problem. Annoying as all hell that something that used to work just fine on a lightweight browser config no longer works.

What's wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

4+3+2 = (9)+2 = 11
4+3+2 = 11
9 + 2 = 11
11 = 11

11=11=11

What's the problem, all of those are equal to 11. If they wanted a different result perhaps they should have been more specific.

Re:What's wrong

[treeves]

Are you trying to say that the reason Yahoo hasn't been more successful is that their employees, led astray by the bad educational system, are lousy at math and this affects Yahoo's performance?
Or are you just replying to the wrong story?

yahoo mail

[jonpublic]

Yahoo mail is an example of doing it wrong. No offense, but when my small team at a university can come up with better spam defenses than yahoo has in our spare time, yahoo has a problem.

Re:yahoo mail

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo has spam defenses? O_o

Re:yahoo mail

[LandGator]

That's what drove me away from Yahoo! Mail, the inadequate spam filtering. Google Mail's filtering was much better, so much better I let my 10 year e-mail address at Yahoo! go moldy and stale. It's still inadequate, six years later, whereas Google Mail does the job. Google's adding POP3 and IMAP access for free (Yahoo! charges) was just icing on the cake.

Yahoo Services

[helix2301]

Yahoo is different type of market then Google or Bing. Yahoo does hosting and there email is much better then hotmail or gmail. They are also aimed at the entertainment market they sponsor a lot of events and do a lot with Hollywood. Plus they have features like flickr and yahoo news. I look at Yahoo as a search engine just aimed at a different market.

Re:Yahoo Services

[Cili]

By your way of spelling 'their' as 'there' it's quite obvious what their 'different market' is supposed to be.

So what actually went wrong?

[frank_adrian314159]

So Yahoo turned out not to be as big as it could have been. So what? A lot of people made money, regardless. The only ones who got didn't were wanks who didn't sell when the selling was good. Sure, PG's pissed^Wsaddened because it didn't turn into the GOOG, but he sort of had a vested interest in that happening, didn't he? Pull the mote out of your own investor's eye, Paul. Really, it's all about the money and most of the people who mattered did just fine by that measure, didn't they?

Re:Google

[axr0101]

The acquisitions that Google made throughout its rapid growth years was amazing. The major acquisitions they made like Blogger, Writely(now Google docs..) , YouTube, DoubleClick..were all successful innovative approaches of the Internet world. Google made the right decisions at the right time. Thanks to one of the best CEOs in the world Eric Schmidt.

Yahoo? - is crap.

[dogzdik]

Yahoo I have an account; or Yahoo!!!! I dumped them and changed to Google. Yahoo's services and the idiots they put on the front line and their shitty multimedia deals with Channel 7 in Australia - just like 9 MSN; Fuck Yahoo - even their free email is notoriously slow and unreliable. Yahoo = Hired. Fired. Won't be redeployed.

Failure to Profit

[Anonymous Coward]

Not long after Yahoo acquired Overture (formerly GoTo.com, the inventors of paid search, which is now Google's bread and butter) in 2003, then CEO Terry Semel basically announced "if your division does not make money, I have no interest in you".

His view was sensible in a business take, but the communication was most unwise. At the time Yahoo's published values, and their practices focused on "creativity, originality and cool". There was hardly enough pressure on any of the units to form a profit making service, if they could come out with some "cool" thingamajig, which led to an entire department being dedicated to developing emoticons (cute and catchy, but not profitable at all). Terry's message instilled panic in division heads across the board.

What followed from the point of view from Overture employees was a complete disaster. Departments from all over Yahoo descended on the Overture infrastructure -- web services, development, client services, NOC -- all clamoring for a piece of the pie. Those Overture departments that were not completely rolled over by another Yahoo "sort of counterpart" had to spend massive effort and focus justifying their existence in the face of absurd departmental power plays. Development efforts underway were stopped, key technologists defected and the once impressive infrastructure started to decay.

Overture at the time was Yahoo's prime source of revenue - that acquisition saved them for the time being. What they ended up doing was killing this business, and drifted back into the "creative malaise" of their youth. In my opinion, their massive failure at simply maintaining a profitable division illustrates their doom.