Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.