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The Google-fication of Yahoo!
Hugh Pickens writes "Since coming to Yahoo!, CEO Marissa Mayer has added a weekly, Friday afternoon all-hands meeting, just like at Google; she announced that henceforth the food in Yahoo's URLs Cafe will be free, just like at Google; and she has begun prepping major changes to the layout of the work spaces and buildings of Yahoo to make it feel more collaborative and cool, just like, well.. you get the idea. Such focus on improving cultural issues is an interesting initial move by the neophyte CEO, since the care and feeding and, most of all, cosseting of employees has been a critical element to Google's success at creating an always-sunny work environment. But Mayer has been up to much more serious business, said several sources, especially product innovation as the savior for Yahoo: Better email! Better search! Better ad-serving! And a special plea to make Flickr awesome again! In other words, better every product Yahoo has to offer. 'This is the sound of Yahoo becoming a technology company again,' says one source. 'It will be all about platforms and products.' Sources say that will likely mean a big splashy tech or product deal in the days ahead, perhaps via an acquisition to signal the new direction, perhaps with the acquisition of a sexy product like Flipboard. In the meantime, many at Yahoo are bracing for a pack of current and former Googlers — Mayer had a lot of loyal staffers — to come on board, writes Kara Swisher. 'And, by the looks of all the Googley changes at Yahoo, they'll feel right at home when they get there.'"
Cue "Workplace Culture Patent Violation" lawsuit in 3... 2... 1...
I hope that they succeed. It would be nice to have multiple viable search, etc solutions, rather than one good provider and awful competitors.
- Johhnn
Personally I don't think its the best idea to try and turn Yahoo into Google, it needs to find its own strengths and play to them, and tackle new markets where there aren't many established superplayers just yet, in order to compete on a more even footing.
It's only a matter of time before someone takes advantage of the failure of Yahoo's stock boards to manage spam and steps into this space. Unless, of course, someone with a fucking clue were to step in and save it. Retail traders may be idiots, but they're a targeted market with disposable income, and they generate clicks in a way that even email users barely do.
she announced that henceforth the food in Yahoo's URLs Cafe will be free, just like at Google;
That goes a long way to creating a happy work place right there.
15 years ago I worked in a place where it took you 10-12 minutes to get past security, walk through the building, across a large area, go up an elevator, get in your car, go through two more security checkpoints, just to get on the main street. Half your lunch break was spent in transit, and you were only allowed 45 minutes.
You were not allowed to eat at your desks, and no break room was provided. Well, it did exist, but it was more like a closet hallway with a two seat mini table. Not set up to allow dozens of people to eat lunch.
There was a 3rd option.... the cafe at the bottom of the building where the owner realized he had a captive audience and made airport food prices seem cheap in comparison.
Yeah... something like this at Yahoo would seem like paradise to me.
We have to modernize Yahoo so that when Microsoft and Google want to buy us out we can demand top price!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Importing Google culture may help in the short term but I can't see it helping Yahoo get it's groove back.
... security measures at these all-hands meetings?
http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/12/yahoo-confirms-apologizes-for-the-email-hack-says-still-fixing-plus-check-if-you-were-impacted-non-yahoo-accounts-apply/
Googlified?
It's all been tried
With smooth visage
Can't take our pride
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
The thing that excites me most is the possibility of Flickr getting some real momentum behind it again. Even now I still prefer Flickr over other photo sharing services, and it would be great to see it get first class status among the users of the internet.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"since the care and feeding and, most of all, cosseting of employees has been a critical element to Google's success at creating an always-sunny work environment"
Actually, the first and foremost reason for Google's success has been its people. And Yahoo has been taking a beating long enough not to have the same caliber of individuals at this point...so cosseting them isn't exactly going to give the same results as Google gets for taking care of their own employees. Not that it isn't a good idea, but I think Yahoo needs to come up with more compelling reasons to work for them, instead of an up-and-comer (which they absolutely are not, unfortunately). I'm a huge fan of companies providing perks for their people; both scientific studies and my own personal experience show that you get a much bigger ROI on those than on straight salary bumps, for the most part. But they aren't going to improve your company's bottom line automatically.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
By the time they realize that are doing all things as being part of google won't care if they become assimilated or not.
Yahoo mail to avoid google mail
Yahoo (or duckduckgo) to avoid google search
Mozilla or Opera browser to avoid google browser
And so on.
I have not found a workaround for youtube, but I don't like having google gathering all this data about me & creating a profile. I want to use alternatives as much as possible.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Key word in the text was "neophyte". Since this is her first at running such a big outfit, and since she has scant time to get it rolling again in a profitable direction, she takes shelter in what she knows. However, the employee base she gets is radically different than that at Google. No ultra-picked pack of uber-nerds that need scant supervision, much less handholding to whip up a frenzy of new products. The legendary Google work environment is tailored to such an employee base and letting loose a less motivated and focused group in so many distractions can be very risky. If things spiral out of control, Yahoo will circle even faster down the drain and her tenure may even establish a shortness record.
I've said this several times before (including in feedback to Yahoo), but I'll say it here just in case anyone from Yahoo! is actually paying attention:
In Yahoo! finance, you really need to give users the option to chart dividend-adjusted price (or, equivalently, "growth of $10,000 investment"). Charting the raw stock price isn't very useful, especially for mutual funds that pay out substantial dividends or capital gains distributions at the end of the year (when the market isn't tanking). Those payouts cause the price to drop, but it's not an economically meaningful drop -- no money was lost. If you try to compare two securities, or compare a security to an index, and the price drops off a cliff every December (again, the drop means nothing), it's just not useful. Yahoo! has the adjusted price data needed to make a useful chart (it's called "Adj Close" in the "Historical Prices" table), it just doesn't give the user a way to chart it.
Hopefully her next action will be to purge the middle layers of the organisation and lose all the naysayers who have no clue how, or desire, to innovate.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I propose that Yahoo gets it's finger out of it's backside and fix Flickr. For months I've been trying to get a "pro" account to upload more photograhs than the standard freebie 200. However like many other complaints in the forums, Yahoo seem to not be bothered in fixing the billing system, many can't log in to even create a billing account, others can't pay or renew what they have. Sounds a bigger problem then just re-arranging how the chairs and desks are in an office for better Feng shui.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Let me preface this with "the plural of anecdote is not data". I have no real stats to back up what I'm about to say.
I still use Yahoo. Yes, "shocker", and that's part of the problem. I've been using them for like... 10 years. About as long as I've been on Slashdot (but that's a separate issue).
Assuming that many of Yahoo's users fit my profile, these steps will not only fail to rejuventate the company but may actually backfire quite badly.
My computer is older too. I'm not interested in paying the early adapter tax. See the trend? I found something that worked. If it ain't broken I'm not going to fix it. I'll even keep using it when it needs a little sticky tape. This is *literally* true for my computer, which has sticky tape holding the left mouse button in place.
Our demographic doesn't spend as much as the cool iStuff demographic. At first blush, it makes sense to try and attract them, and to hell with guys like me, right?
The problem? No ammount of re-working can make Yahoo "cool" to the iKids, and too much re-working will make it broken to me.
I'm on the record in my Tweet stream with, "there's nothing wrong with Yahoo that couldn't be fixed by rolling back to a stable release from 2010". You can argue about the year; but it's hard to argue that Yahoo has gotten much return on their new development.
Yahoo might be going down a path that ends with no new customers, and old customers leaving. I'll be sad if it comes to that; but it's just one more AJAXy script that stalls the browser away from making me search for a new provider.
I am glad Yahoo is getting ready for their Google masters by changing their ways so when Google feels it is time for them to amalgamate that there will be little compatibility issues.
Marissa should bring Steve Regge onboard so he can teach Yahoo people to eat their own dogfood and build a common platform around Flickr and YIM that will be API accessible for 3rd party developers to develop an ecosystem!
A second giant corporation will treat it's employees properly?
Does this mean Armageddon is coming twice?
Lots of luck to them. Google is good, but needs some real competition to become better.
If you know something that works, copy it.
I don't suppose they'll drop the practice of charging an annual fee for the privilege of email forwarding. Quite a nasty move, IMO.
Last time I interviewed at Yahoo! (it WAS a while ago), I could see the problems that eventually have hurt the company. The manager was rather self-righteous and obsessed with buzzwords and names of methodologies, giving me examples and demanding to know which researcher's approach I would take to solve the issue. That bottlenecked, narrowminded thinking limits innovation and stifles flexibility, as something a little different can often get good results faster and less expensively.
I'm hoping that manager isn't there any longer, but it really showed, at the time, that both the culture she created and the people she tended to hire would...well...bring Yahoo! to a lot of the problems it has experienced.
We don't want a Google clone. We want a company that actually CARES about technology and just about being an advertising company.
Kellie put on this public persona of a vapid blonde bimbo but is actually quite clever in real life. Marissa just seems like the total opposite.
My wife was a fairly high-level employee at Yahoo during the first dotcom boom, and from what she'd told me about her time there, these are exactly the kinds of things Yahoo used to have implemented during their first heyday, and subsequently were phased out once the bottom dropped out.
So this means they'll ditch Bing for ... something else, and maybe add things like labels and tags to their email platform.
I'd be worried at Microsoft - this could end up looking in the same mould as Elop at Nokia.
'This is the sound of Yahoo becoming a technology company again,'
This seems to be a the latest fad corporate makeover meme (but it's been around a few times). Somebody realizes that only outfits with lots of good technology and technology people are going to dominate in technology-based business. Except, oops, the technology people were all driven away to brighter realms. All the company has left for technical staff are operations/engineering/sysadmin "do-ers" who "just do it" despite the institutionalized anti-patterns. Now a new ceo comes on board and they want to "bring back the technology culture". Most of the time the non-technical CEO turns out to be a cargo-cultist...YMMV with those funny religions.
Earnings Per Share sits in final judgement...
"layout of the work spaces"
People at Google don't get (individual) offices, right? They're either in big open areas or share offices with several other people?
Do Yahoo employees (currently) get offices?
I consider it a big benefit to have my own office (with a door I can close, though I usually leave it cracked open).. Though I would even prefer a cube to a shared office in most cases.
Next step...
Welcome back to the 1990s.
So, when will Yahoo team up with Oracle and make an underwhelming Phone OS: yPhone powered by Oracle's Java!
Note: Prefixing "Java" with "Oracle's" will be made mandatory, on penalty of TOS violation.
The "Better email!" target is the one they need to work on first.
Every time I have to correspond with someone with a BT/Yahoo e-mail account I have to explain to them how to check their spam folders for lost messages. They always find other ones there too which Yahoo's dreadful spam filter has consigned there without consultation or good reason.
BT/Yahoo e-mail should come with a health warning.
If Marissa manages to implement Google's flat hierarchy and solid build/development environment and the other good bits like reasonable amount of bureaucracy she might have a winner. I just hope she doesn't copy Google's arrogance. It's get old really quickly to see Googler's brag about how they are 5+ years ahead of the rest of the industry (like if the engineers working for other companies were idiots) and looking down at other companies achievements.
In short, copy Google's best practices and fire the condescending assholes, of which there are plenty working for Google right now.
--
The Strong Jas
Vimeo = youtube
The homepage of yahoo needs to go. There must be over 200 links on that page!
I don't know who came up with the idea of Friday afternoon meetings but unless they're accompanied by quantities of alcohol, they usually end up becoming modern day equivalents of lynchings or Soviet-era show trials. They have the great potential to end up destroying morale and productivity. Meetings in general are a tremendous waste of time (IMHO) and a large company is better served by very brief, daily morning meetings among teams or daily updates via some other means of communication, rather than stopping the entire operation dead for an hour or two on a Friday afternoon.
YaHoo was a great company way back when and still is. They just lost direction and become over looked once Google and Bing came along. They seem to have to many products at the moment, which are none the less great but right now they need a focus and a single direction. Maybe new search algorithms and perhaps a refreshment of the brand. I hope they succeed.
tonyaldo.com
Too bad they're getting cozy with Facebook. Otherwise I wouldn't have queued my account for deletion that day (I was still logged in after I clicked ok to that, so I have a feeling something got blocked or it just didn't quite go through, but that might just be the 90-day wait time).
I'm also concerned they'll bring in the Google+ elements of Google, perhaps even to look more attractive to FB (unless, of course, FB would rather have them strictly use FB's systems and UI for that).
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
So, she'll be doing the opposite of what Fiorina did in wrecking the culture of HP (among other things). I think these changes alone aren't enough to save Yahoo, but it's a good start, picking the low-hanging fruit.
- T
Steve Jobs (praise be his name) had a quote about IBM and institutionalizing process without focusing on the company's actual product:
Now they serve up pages that don't even have all the words you're searching for, even if you specifically tell it to only return results with that word. Quotes are useless in a Google search any more.
I wondered if that was just me, I used to use quotes all the time to make sure I got something fairly relevant, but of late it seems not to really limit things well... I just thought perhaps the syntax for blocking exact phrases had changed, but I could not find mention of any new way to lock down sets of words.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
... can't be worse than the past 15+ years where Yahoo has been cruising on its massive early success and has had a succession of CEOs that have basically been draining the tank. Semel was probably the worst, attempting to turn Yahoo into a "media company" (because he personally was a "media CEO" - dumb hire on Yahoo's part) but Barth and Yang weren't much better, though Yang's intentions were more pure - Yahoo is, after all, his and Filo's baby.
I wish them the best. For some crazy reason I keep going back to their home page and I've had my Yahoo Mail address for well over 10 years now. I can still remember when they were hosted on akebono.standford.edu. It's been a long, strange trip.
Lots of people still use and like Yahoo mail.
Also, Yahoo has really excellent sports coverage (thanks in part to a long ago effort to spend money on first-hand coverage).
Then there is Flickr, still my favorite social photo sharing service that just needs to be overhauled a bit.
I'm sure there are other things too, it was really only search that I found Yahoo terrible at. Everything else they still do reasonably well.
Well, except for Yahoo Answers, but perhaps they could turn that into an entertainment venue...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
None of this will help Yahoo. It's doomed. "Make everything better and copy Google": this is a strategy?
You were not allowed to eat at your desks,
I'm not eating - I'm snacking. I just snack at a high volume.
If they want to sack for a snack, well I dare them...
Seriously, never put up with bullshit rules.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What about Vimeo?
There are a number of other alternate video sharing sites too, but Vimeo works really well. They were even first with HD support.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The High Council deems your post "unfunny." Report to HQ to have your stick reinserted properly.
You aren't really saving anything by using yahoo instead of google, the NSA sees it all, for better or worse.
Of course, that is taken for granted. Also any network admin on any hop your email takes you can assume is reading it also, along with a variety of Russians, Chinese, etc. etc.
What you are saving, the only thing that matters is that GOOGLE cannot see it (well, your end anyway). That is the thing of interest to avoid, since they are the ones who are effectively correlating things.
It doesn't matter if the NSA sees all my data because (a) being a giant government agency I doubt they have the skills to do squat with it, and (b) since they are secretive by definition very few people will see the results of gathering my data. You have no idea with Google what may happen or who they may share with.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm hoping Yahoo turns itself around. 10-15 years ago, Yahoo was my literal internet home. One stop shopping for most of the daily entertainment including playing Yahoo Games like Hearts and Spades. I'd like to see it come back without turning into a Facebook/Google data mining front (GL w/ that, I know).
My plea is for her to fix the card game forums. As it is, they're being overrun by poor sports:
* "Trammers" (TRAM: The Rest Are Mine), who get mad when they're losing and use a convenience feature to eat point hands quickly and kill your shot at a comeback.
* Stallers: people who've figured out how to game the timeouts to wait you out when they're losing. You either leave, wait out, or take a forfeit.
* Spammers: people have figure out how to bot the applets with spams
* No good filtration system: would be good to have a mechanism to flag problem players.
* Interface hasn't changed in 10 years.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Well not as funny as the current conservative candidate, not only is he one but he owns one. Now that's a rich dude.
Well not as funny as the current conservative candidate, not only is he one but he owns one. Now that's a rich dude.
You can laugh about Mitt all you want, but when HE dies, he'll get his own planet to lord over. It's the planet next to Tom Cruise's planet...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
... cleaning up the trashy Yahoo email design? It's stuffed with so much distracting memetrash and sensationalistic links to non-new stories, it makes me want to close my account and change over completely to Google Mail. I would accept a little Google-like keyword-mining if it would mean they could drop crap-looking banner ads and decrease the visual noise level.
...on a Friday afternoon? Seriously, do you hate your staff or something?
Friday afternoon is the time when you call in time-in-lieu on all the overtime you've done during the earlier part of the week.
Fix del.icio.us buy reddit. don't ruin it. and off you go.
Thanks, that didn't quite work - but when combined with the quotes it works again as it should. Searching for :
-req "food animus"
Returns only results where food and animus are next to each other in that order...
Do not ask why I searched for Food Animus, and why there are so many results...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'd love Yahoo to be a technology company again, but let's be real. The current tech employees have stayed in a rudderless, troubled, company for many years - even paying for their lunches :-) - rather than move to energized, successful, growing companies like google, facebook, or starting their own company, or lots of other seemingly better choices ... why exactly? If Mayer tries to make this a tech company actually utilizing the D team - which is what she has - in any real capacity it's going to be very frustrating. Doing surgery with heavy gloves on. (And if she does have the management ability to pull this off, why not just save some money and get everything done in India?) Or plan B for making Yahoo a tech company would be: bring in good people, e.g. from Google, let them run the show and hire new people who actually get things done, and in the meantime rotate almost all of the old Yahoo technology workforce. Great game plan, just survive the 4 years of turmoil and politics while you pull it off.
Yahoo as it exists today is a very poor starting point for deep technology-based success. It needs a business plan that is not tech-centric.
I'd recommend Yahoo Groups owners or member make off-site backups and have alternative arrangements in place. Wouldn't be the first time history was lost (eg. the old Delphi Forums). Not saying Yahoo would do anything monumentally stupid, but better safe than sorry. You won't get another chance if something did happen.
Funny. Usenet worked great. Why were these balkanized commercial ghettos, web fora, and now social media even necessary? Ah, yes, "monetization" and ad clicks. ROI. Now there are even forum aggregators. The wheel turns full circle, gets 22" rims and bling, while bandwidth consumption goes exponential as the S/N ratio asymptotically approaches zero.
A Yahoo is someone not quite bright enough to be considered a redneck. So when do we get pictures of her ass?
Well not as funny as the current conservative candidate,
Which one? Last I checked, at least two people beholden to corporate interests were running.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Yahoogle
I think the new CEO's actions so far are great. However, I have a bad feeling that the board will grow impatient with the logic of actually building something and getting competitive. Companies in the end are stuck with whatever idiocy their shareholders want which is quick short-term profits. The board will kick her out before she has a chance to really fix Yahoo!
Yahoo finance is decent. It has some bugs. They never got past all the talent loss from their firing sprees. I think a lot of the folks that built and tested those systems are gone. That means they have to rebuild or put in time to get employees truly up to speed and specialized on the systems again.
Yahoo has long been the Fifth of Everything. It's been the poster kid "wow, you're still here?"
So I'm all for a new CEO who looks sideways on the facts and might make them survive. I picked Yahoo mail a long time ago as much as anything to be Non-Microsoft Non-Google.
So if they can get some other stuff working, go for it.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
1. They support open source.
They have a slew of open source and free stuff:
YUI (Yahoo User Interface, a CSS and Javascript library), YSlow (page analyzer), YQL (query language for the web), APIs, and design pattern library.
http://developer.yahoo.com
2. It would be horrible to have a Google-only (or Apple-only) world. Here's hoping Google and Samsung prevail against Apple, and that Yahoo carves a niche for itself from Google.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
While it's good that Yahoos will be getting free food, the news of the name of Yahoo's cafe will now spark a pronunciation flame war:
URLs Cafe
The only way that makes sense is if you pronounce URL as "Earl".
Do people actually do that? The same number of people that call GUID "Goo Idd"?
The sane pronunciation is You Are Elle.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Well when you talk about echasketch I only count his primary persona (and platform) and his general election person as one person. Of course he is not beholding to corporate interests, he is a corporate interest. But then we know they are people too.
Actually I believe in re-incarnation and I think he might just come back as a corporation, oh wait, he already is one, maybe a 100% employer contributed 401k program, as penance.
"Googley"? haha. Ms. Swisher must hang out with Zoolander frequently.