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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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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!
Kind thoughts do not change the world
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.
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.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
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.
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.
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.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
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
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.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
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.
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.