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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.'"
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.
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
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.
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.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
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
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
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.
They mean the employee culture, not the user culture.
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 :)
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.
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.
Kriston
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.
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)
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
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.