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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.'"
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.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
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.
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.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
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.
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.
-rozzin.
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!
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
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.
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.