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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wouldn't be so sure of that. Google may be a big name that looks good on a resume, but their payscales (ya know, actual cash compensation, the type that pays a mortgage) are crap.
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.
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
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
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.
Huh??? From what I have heard, Google's pay is by far the best in the 'Valley, both cash only and total (including stock/benefits). That said, you're not going to get rich working for either them or Yahoo. You only make it big here by lucking into an employee-number-[2..20] role.
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.
That's, err, very out-of-line with what I've heard, and I've had friends there only a few years ago -- word was that the total comp was healthy (after you considered everything they spent on you -- a great deal of which wasn't in any way cash-equivalent), but the cash comp not at all.
That said, every time I've been in their interviewing pipeline (three times now, I think?), I ended up accepting a job somewhere else before we got to the point of salary negotiation, so my impressions are distinctly secondhand (not third- or fourth-hand, mind you).
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
Are you considering the food as cash equivalent?
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
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
Couldn't tell if this was joking -- doesn't really translate over text -- so I'm taking the question as serious.
Of course not. If I can't convert it immediately and directly to cash, it's only as cash-equivalent as what it saves me -- and I can cook for myself cheaply (measured in time as well as money -- pressure cooking means a simple chicken-and-potatoes dinner is all of 15 minutes), or rely on the spouse (who used to own a catering company) for fantastic food if she's not putting in too many hours herself.
That said -- my current employer does cater breakfast and lunch, and I will admit that it's convenient. That convenience doesn't translate into being able to pay off the mortgage, however, and the cash component is not a thing to forget easily. Did my time at penniless startups and enjoyed it greatly, but that's a game for the young; I'm older and more risk-adverse these days.
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.
Well, I actually was being serious, because I thought most people would consider it equivalent.. In the same way that you said, in what it saves you.
Like others said in the thread, I definitely think things like free food are appreciated more than the amount of money they save the person. Heck, if it was food I liked, I'd love to have free lunches. Sure, I'd probably still go out to eat once in a while.
"Googley"? haha. Ms. Swisher must hang out with Zoolander frequently.