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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.'"
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.
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.
What universe did you live in? There was a little thing AltaVista in that time period.
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.
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.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.