Ask Slashdot: Can Yahoo Actually Stage a Comeback?

Nerval's Lobster writes "Fresh off purchasing Tumblr for $1.1 billion, Yahoo has moved to the next stage of what's becoming a company-wide reboot: fixing Flickr, the photo-sharing service that it acquired in 2005 and subsequently allowed to languish. Yahoo boosted Flickr accounts' individual storage capacity to one free terabyte, revamped the Website's overall look, and launched a new Flickr app for Google Android, among other tweaks. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer clearly wants her company to fight toe-to-toe on features with Google and Facebook, but she faces a long road ahead of her: not only does she need to streamline Yahoo's cumbersome corporate structure and product portfolio into something that resembles fighting shape, but she needs to reverse the general perception that Yahoo is teetering on the edge of history's trash-bin, with an aging customer base and unexciting features. The question is, could anyone actually pull it off? Is Yahoo capable of an Apple-style turnaround, or are its current actions merely delaying the inevitable?"

Comments

Can Apple Actually Stage a Comeback?

[Anonymous Coward]

Headlines Slashdot would've run in 1996, and the comments would've resoundingly been "no."

Re:Can Apple Actually Stage a Comeback?

[Anonymous Coward]

More relevant: Can slashdot stage a comeback?

Re:Can Apple Actually Stage a Comeback?

[Anonymous Coward]

Answer is also "no." It's so far gone, people don't even ask the question anymore.

Re:Can Apple Actually Stage a Comeback?

[Grishnakh]

There's always an exception somewhere. Steve Jobs, love him or hate him, was a uniquely talented individual, and if Apple hadn't brought him back the way they did, they would indeed have died years ago. I seriously doubt this Marissa Mayer is this sort of uniquely talented person. Moreover, Apple has always had a bit of a cult around it due to the qualities of its products (remember, their whole goal was to make computers that regular people could use for work and everyday tasks, hence their extreme focus on UI and UX from way back when Jobs toured PARC). Yahoo doesn't have anything like this; its whole claim to fame was that it was a web portal back in the days before Google and search engines; essentially it started out as a giant web directory. This whole concept is totally obsolete now, so they tried to pitch themselves as a "front page" to the internet, but not many people care about that any more.

The only way I see them surviving is if they use the cash they still have and re-invent themselves into something different, mostly abandoning this "web portal" crap. I have no idea what that would be, however, and since really revolutionary ideas (like Facebook, Twitter, etc.) never come from large, established corporations, but rather from tiny start-ups, I think their days are very numbered.

Re:Can Apple Actually Stage a Comeback?

[jimmetry]

Of course it can. Eventually someone will get pissed off and ask to get involved. ....k, I just looked at their job listings...

http://slashdot.org/job_board.pl

How on earth could this website take that many people to run?!

Re:Can Apple Actually Stage a Comeback?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only way I see them surviving is if they use the cash they still have and re-invent themselves into something different, mostly abandoning this "web portal" crap. I have no idea what that would be, however, and since really revolutionary ideas (like Facebook, Twitter, etc.) never come from large, established corporations, but rather from tiny start-ups, I think their days are very numbered.

Just buy the right start-up? Buy any start-up and pray one of them generates enough hype and money to make you relevant? Are we in Bubble 21.13?

Re:Can Apple Actually Stage a Comeback?

[jimmetry]

Oh herp derp. That's for OTHER companies.

So then who maintains slashdot code? CmdTaco? samzenpus?

Re:Can Apple Actually Stage a Comeback?

[flimflammer]

Are you actually trying to make a point somewhere?

Re:Can Apple Actually Stage a Comeback?

[MrEdofCourse]

"More relevant: Can slashdot stage a comeback?"

NO, and if they don't revert their last design overhaul, I'm going to delete my account!

Re:Can Apple Actually Stage a Comeback?

[fisted]

...and nothing of value was lost.

Re:Can Apple Actually Stage a Comeback?

[Grishnakh]

No, because history shows that big corporations buying start-ups never turns out well. The big corp has no idea how to effectively use the new start-up, and its potential (assuming it had any) ends up being wasted.

Of course, most start-ups go nowhere too. But of those lucky few that succeed, we do get things like Google, Yahoo (back when they were successful), and Facebook (ugh).

Re:Can Apple Actually Stage a Comeback?

[WaywardGeek]

I agree on all points. However, I don't know what I'm talking about, as results clearly show. Back in either 1998 or 2000 (my wife and disagree as to which party it was), I told a young grad student from Stanford that Yahoo was not only dominating, but would continue to dominate if they did nothing other than buy up all promising new web sites and technologies. This geek was dumb enough to work for stock as the first employee of a company founded by two professors -- yeah, like that ever works. Their big plan was taking on Yahoo and winning, when they had pretty much no capital and from what I could tell, no clue. I knew enough about decent marketing to know they'd be crushed by Yahoo's money. That kid was the first Google employee. So, take whatever I believe, for instance that Yahoo is now clearly doomed, and run the other way.

Re:Can Apple Actually Stage a Comeback?

[WaywardGeek]

Just to back up my point, in 1998, or 1999, I had my wife sell all her Apple stock and buy Red Hat. I could describe why I felt that was wise, but reality clearly proved me wrong. Can Yahoo turn around? I have to say I'd love to see it.

Re:Can Apple Actually Stage a Comeback?

[slashdot_commentator]

Apple, back in 1998-1999, was on the brink of bankruptcy. Even the early years of Jobs return, Apple was putting out colorful plastic, underpowered computers. It wasn't until the introduction of the Ipod, and Apple's redirection into the consumer device market, did Apple dig itself out of its 1990's stupor.

Did reality prove you wrong? Hasn't the Red Hat stock grown in multiples of its 1990's value? Did she sell it in the early 2000's?

Re:Can Apple Actually Stage a Comeback?

[teg]

Apple, back in 1998-1999, was on the brink of bankruptcy. Even the early years of Jobs return, Apple was putting out colorful plastic, underpowered computers. It wasn't until the introduction of the Ipod, and Apple's redirection into the consumer device market, did Apple dig itself out of its 1990's stupor.

Did reality prove you wrong? Hasn't the Red Hat stock grown in multiples of its 1990's value? Did she sell it in the early 2000's?

Red Hat had a stock value of 140 before the dot-com crash.... with the amount of stock then in circulation, this was utterly insane and it fell to 2-3 dollars before going up to the 10-20 range a couple of years later. Lately, it's been 50-60 so still needs more than a doubling to reach the old top.

The pricing back then was utterly insane, though...

Re:Can Apple Actually Stage a Comeback?

[Anonymous Coward]

More relevant: Can slashdot stage a comeback?

Maybe if they hire hot chicks as editors...

Re:Can Apple Actually Stage a Comeback?

[Grishnakh]

Isn't that true of lots of companies from that time though?

Really, I think Apple was an exception, one which very few people could have predicted accurately. "slashdot_commenter" is right; their fortunes really didn't turn around until the iPod.

Re:Can Apple Actually Stage a Comeback?

[jeremymiles]

Like Android? Or Where 2 (became Google Maps)? Or Writely (became Google Docs, became Google Apps). There are plenty of failures, but there are successes too.

Re:Can Apple Actually Stage a Comeback?

[Grishnakh]

Hmm. You seem to have a good point here.

Of course, every single one of those seems to be a Google acquisition. Does Yahoo have any similar successes to point to? I doubt it.

Re:Can Apple Actually Stage a Comeback?

[jeremymiles]

Errrmmm ... Geocities? OK, I doubt it too.

Re:Can Apple Actually Stage a Comeback?

[painandgreed]

No, because history shows that big corporations buying start-ups never turns out well. The big corp has no idea how to effectively use the new start-up, and its potential (assuming it had any) ends up being wasted.

Perhaps they need to do like Apple. Find a startup like NeXt. Buy them, and then turn over all their resources over to the startup to run, essentially letting their people take over the company. Let the new fresh talent do the next best thing with the old company.

Re:Can Apple Actually Stage a Comeback?

[Grishnakh]

Sounds good, but I seriously doubt this Marissa person would be interested in doing that and essentially putting herself out of a job, and also making herself look incapable.

Re:Can Apple Actually Stage a Comeback?

[unixisc]

Good that you mentioned Apple. Some months back, I opined that Apple should acquire Google, since the search engine is one thing that Google has and they don't. With Yahoo, they'd get a ready made customer base and services, and what they'd need would be to beautify the sites and make them smoother/cooler to use - something Apple excels at. I still believe that an acquisition by Apple would be the best way forward for Google

Re:Can Apple Actually Stage a Comeback?

[cheesybagel]

Actually I thought they had a chance of recovery ever since I heard they planned to adquire NeXT. Their major problem was their POS obsolete OS. Then when Steve Jobs pulled the plug on Mac clones and the first iMac came out, ridiculous as it looked back then, I thought they had pretty much left the danger zone. Of course I could never predict the level of success they eventually attained with their iPod and iPhone back then. However their iPhone clearly couldn't have happened without their NeXT aquisition as it uses that same base to run all the software. The fact that Apple got their hands on an easily portable operating system was what enabled their moves to x86 and ARM for their devices in such a quick succession. Had they remained stuck using PowerPC they probably wouldn't have got to their present point.

The iPod is a different beast considering the OS it ran was totally unrelated with MacOS X.

How are we supposed to know

[Anonymous Coward]

"Could anyone actually pull it off? Is Yahoo capable of an Apple-style turnaround, or are its current actions merely delaying the inevitable?"

How are we supposed to know?

Re:How are we supposed to know

[PlastikMissle]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric_question

Re: How are we supposed to know

[Anonymous Coward]

But it's an Ask Slashdot question! That should be an indication that it is the opposite of a rhetorical question. What is the question being asked of slashdot if not the questions I quoted?

Re:How are we supposed to know

[Anonymous Coward]

Read your own link, it's not a rhetorical question unless they are trying to make a point, not ask for an answer or opinion.

In this case it's just a question that doesn't have a definite answer yet, like "will I win the lottery?" A rhetorical question would be more like "why does Yahoo! still bother?"

Re: How are we supposed to know

[hairyfeet]

Yeah this is a giant fail because the whole point of "Ask Slashdot" is to ask solvable problems that are too geeky for your usual places, stuff like "How can I record securely in my car" or like the problem I had with a customer whose computers kept getting hacked i asked in the comments where it turned out his router had been compromised, its for questions which can actually be ANSWERED.

Whether Yahoo can pull off a come back or not should really be under general, not under Ask Slashdot. As for the question itself, if they continue to not be MSFT? Its possible, I've been making countless Yahoo accounts for customers pissed off at MSFT killing Live Messenger and Hotmail so they could pick up those users and run with them as long as they don't shit all over the UIs like MSFT does.

Of course

[MrEricSir]

Yahoo *could* stage a comeback, but why? What makes a product or service from Yahoo unique?

Can't answer that question? Of course not. Yahoo is a holding company made up of numerous acquisitions. If there's an identity buried in there somewhere, it's a Frankenstein's monster, stitched together out of spare parts. There's nothing cohesive about Yahoo, nothing that makes it special as a company, and there never was.

Re:Of course

[sribe]

Can't answer that question? Of course not. Yahoo is a holding company made up of numerous acquisitions. [wikipedia.org] If there's an identity buried in there somewhere, it's a Frankenstein's monster, stitched together out of spare parts. There's nothing cohesive about Yahoo, nothing that makes it special as a company, and there never was.

That's all true. But the question is whether or not that can be changed ;-)

Re:Of course

[HockeyPuck]

Yahoo *could* stage a comeback, but why? What makes a product or service from Yahoo unique?

Can't answer that question? Of course not. Yahoo is a holding company made up of numerous acquisitions. If there's an identity buried in there somewhere, it's a Frankenstein's monster, stitched together out of spare parts. There's nothing cohesive about Yahoo, nothing that makes it special as a company, and there never was.

So what if it's made up of acquisitions...? I doubt there's very many large companies that haven't made a significant number of acquisitions. All three with far more than 100 companies bought or merged with:

http://www.cisco.com/web/about/doing_business/corporate_development/acquisitions/about_cisco_acquisitions.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Google
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_IBM

By the way, it seems that Yahoo! has the fewest acquisitions of any of the three, including your oh so dear to your heart google.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Yahoo!

How'd you get marked insightful?

Re:Of course

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't that just a stealth layoff to avoid announcing a layoff, since many remote workers cannot relocate.

Re:Of course

[longk]

IMHO that's just her way of waking everybody up and making it clear this boat is changing its course. With time, I'm sure people will be working remotely once again.

Re:Of course

[PlastikMissle]

I understand the "overrated" part, but why the "bimbo" part?

Re:Of course

[Anonymous Coward]

Watch Seinfeld on the concept of working from home. I'm pretty sure that's the same problem they had.

Re:Of course

[jbmartin6]

cancelling all remote working while the rest of the word is learning how to adapt to and benefit from it

Google doesn't allow much remote work either. Are you claiming Google is also run by idiotic, overrated bimbos?

Re:Of course

[Grishnakh]

Because she's a female. If she were a man, we could call him an "overrated bozo". You wouldn't call a woman a "bozo", since that's a reference to Bozo the Clown, who was a man.

Re:Of course

[pauljlucas]

... cancelling all remote working while the rest of the word is learning how to adapt to and benefit from it.

I talked to someone who works for Yahoo who told me that, out of the roughly 11K employees, this affects only around a couple of hundred. Of those, many will simply get a desk/cubicle at the office (thereby meeting the "on site" requirement), but actually still work at home most of the time. The reality is that this is basically a non-change.

That being the case, it still makes you wonder (if it's as much or a non-change as claimed by the Yahoo employee I spoke to) why bother? The Yahoo employee has no answer to that.

Re:Of course

[Anonymous Coward]

cancelling all remote working while the rest of the word is learning how to adapt to and benefit from it

Google doesn't allow much remote work either. Are you claiming Google is also run by idiotic, overrated bimbos?

Well it was, before she moved to Yahoo.. ;-)

Re:Of course

[gmhowell]

What does 'bimbo' add to the discussion that wouldn't have been covered by, as just one possibility, the word 'idiot'?

I read AVFM and other MHRA sites daily, and even I have to wonder what your word choice brings to the discussion.

Re:Of course

[Dahamma]

Yeah, but Yahoo had some of the stupidest acquisitions, starting with the $5.7B debacle known as Broadcast.com.

The only thing of any note coming out of that deal is the Dallas Mavericks winning the NBA championship (otherwise known as "Thank you Yahoo!... you suckers! Sincerely, Mark Cuban")

Re:Of course

[Anonymous Coward]

I was employed with Yahoo when they made the WFH change. We were lied to even within the company. It was initially communicated permanent WFH employees would no longer be able to WFH to help drive innovation. 160-something permanent WFH people out of ~16,000 employees were suppose to make a HUGE impact on innovation?? It became clear shortly after the announcement that it was BS. The real reason was communicated a few days later. They made the decision after looking at the VPN logs and saw people WFH weren't even logging in. Not necessarily the permanent WFH people, just in general. It wasn't a stealth layoff, it was a get people to actually do their work.

Do I think Yahoo will make a comeback? Absolutely not. There is way too much dysfunction in that company to fix.

Re:Of course

[Anonymous Coward]

>Google doesn't allow much remote work either.
[citation needed]

Re:Of course

[spire3661]

Why not? Would you have objected to a similar insult to a man?

Re:Of course

[oldhack]

And also, calling a girl "bozo" would be offensive to women, and that would be uncivilized. Right?

Re:Of course

[spire3661]

If it had been a man, would have you even commented? I'll admit its not a term i would have used, but only because of the distraction you are providing my white-knighting it.

Re:Of course

[Anonymous Coward]

IMHO that's just her way of waking everybody up and making it clear this boat is changing its course. With time, I'm sure people will be working remotely once again.

Way to go. Irritate and annoy your best and brightest, some of which will leave thanks to the stupidity. It doesn't matter if you're the CEO. Stupid is as stupid does. What she's done here is make it clear she'll be issuing edicts from above and leaving people who have special circumstances or prior arrangements out in the cold. Many who can leave will. Those who can't become disgruntled. IDIOT!

Re:Of course

[DerekLyons]

Yahoo *could* stage a comeback, but why? What makes a product or service from Yahoo unique?

Frankly, you could ask the same question, substituting "Google", and give the same answer.
 
The only real difference between them is Google is (and inexplicably remains) a darling of the soi-disant technorati. Hence the constant stream of comments like yours and those in the summary. In reality, Yahoo! is much like Facebook, doing decently despite the fact that a narrow and shallow demographic disapproves of it.
 
What's going to kill Yahoo! though is Mayer's misguided attempts to make it hip and kewl and l33t and taking on Google rather than keeping it functional and improving the dodgy and bodgy bits. The Flickr 'upgrade' is nothing but flash and sizzle that's added nothing, dropped existing functionality, and ignored some longstanding problems. Worse yet - ads are coming...

Re:Of course

[Tough Love]

No, because she's a bimbo. Do a little research, the facts aren't hard to find.

Re:Of course

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a natural reaction to someone who gets where she gets by "dating" Larry Page

Re:Of course

[Anonymous Coward]

More like there hasn't been since the beginning. Yahoo's original offering was search, which was a human edited (you listening wikinerds?) search engine. Following that was Yahoo Mail. Somewhere during this was the first dot-com crash where advertisements suddenly wisened up. Everything after that has been acquisitions.

Anyone remember Yahoo auctions? Those still exist in Japan. Yahoo is largely (or only) successful in Japan. Why that is, I don't know.

Re:Of course

[mtb_ogre]

If it were a man, would he have used a term that implies someone's incompetence is tied to their sex?

Bimbo: An attractive but empty-headed young woman, esp. one perceived as a willing sex object.

Re:Of course

[LWATCDR]

Except that it made $3.370.000,000 in net profit. I have to wonder why people keep talking about can Yahoo stage a comeback. It is still making a lot of money. I wish I was failing by only making 3.75 billion dollars.

Re:Of course

[Grishnakh]

Yes, that may very well be, but if she were a male, you wouldn't call her (him) that. A stupid male you might call a "bozo" (or just a moron or idiot), but never a "bimbo"; that's reserved for women. I'm only pointing this out because it loos like PlastikMissle has some kind of problem with the usage of the word "bimbo". I'm just pointing out that it's entirely appropriate.

Re:Of course

[Grishnakh]

No, it just wouldn't make any sense, just like calling a man a "bimbo" wouldn't make any sense at all. Calling a woman a "bimbo", and a man a "bozo", is fine; you're just alleging that the person in question is not very competent.

Re:Of course

[Tough Love]

If she were a man, the technical term would be "dickhead".

Re:Of course

[oldhack]

Oh, I don't know. I've seen some male bimbos in my days so far.

Re:Of course

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo *could* stage a comeback, but why? What makes a product or service from Yahoo unique?

Can't answer that question? Of course not. Yahoo is a holding company made up of numerous acquisitions. If there's an identity buried in there somewhere, it's a Frankenstein's monster, stitched together out of spare parts. There's nothing cohesive about Yahoo, nothing that makes it special as a company, and there never was.

And yet ironically, for a company that "never was", they just dropped 1.1 billion on another something birthed out of fucking nothing.

Sorry, but these days, you can polish a turd into a billion-dollar diamond. All you have to do is get the social lemmings to follow you, and they suddenly find you worth hundreds of millions.

Just ask any meatsack posting idiotic videos on YouTube making six figures how easy it is to be a fucking moron on this world and still be successful.

Kind of makes you want to wipe your ass with your Masters degree hanging on wall, and you would, if you weren't still paying the fucking loan.

Re:Of course

[TrollstonButterbeans]

What makes a product or service from Yahoo unique?

I'm kinda partial to their chocolate 'Yahoo' drink that comes in the glass bottle at the convenience store.

Re:Of course

[gronofer]

Customer service, perhaps? What do you do when Google closes your account for no obvious reason, as people have reported? They won't reply to your emails. I don't have a lot of experience dealing with Yahoo, but a recent email to fix a login problem with a service I haven't used in years, did actually get a useful reply.

Re:Of course

[metlin]

Simple: It's a PR stunt.

Re:Of course

[pauljlucas]

Simple: It's a PR stunt.

But it's bad PR.

Re:Of course

[Anonymous Coward]

(AC due to moderation) These days, "bozo" is a unisex word referring to someone that behaves foolishly; most people under 50 are unaware it's an old reference to a clown. It's also totally different from a bimbo (or "himbo"), which is an airhead that uses his/her sex appeal, flirtation, or outright sexual favors to get ahead in life, whether it's free dessert at a restaurant, a raise, breaking up a marriage to become a trophy wife, or gaining a major promotion at work.

So, unless you have some proof that she did sleep/flirt her way to the top, "bimbo" wouldn't be accurate, because how shitty she is as a business leader has nothing to do with how attractive she is or which set of reproductive organs she has.

Re:Of course

[Anonymous Coward]

it could be argued that driving innovation is normal part of "work" at Yahoo.

Re:Of course

[ferret4]

mod this up

Re:Of course

[VortexCortex]

There's nothing cohesive about Yahoo, nothing that makes it special as a company, and there never was.

That's all true. But the question is whether or not that can be changed ;-)

The answer is: Does it even matter? Windows: On the desktop: "Holy crap! Fire the UI design team, wait Vista viruses work on 8? Aaaah! Don't use it for servers! What are you insane?" In Gaming: "Hmm, not to shabby. Why can't they do this on the desktop?" On Search: "What's a Bing?!" On Phones: "HA ha ha ha HA ha ha"

So, Dr. Frankenstein's Monster seems to be the only way any things ever really done. Just look at Google. A search and ads company that wants to replicate designer Geordi Laforge visors and be a social network too. Apple's the same, iTunes sucks, hardware overpriced, can't use the OS anywhere but their own hardware, reducing market for 3rd party devs, server platform was a stillborn -- They sell hard on "image", but it's far more nebulous than you believe. Servers? Really? $100 just for xcode? Is that so users won't experiment and write their own software? I mean, turn on my IIe, and there's a BASIC programming prompt... I learned to code in elementary school by accident thanks to that... Charging for the feature? So, iWhatever is not a computer, it's a consumption device. That's the image in my mind. A treacherous overpriced landmine, waiting to have the proprietary plug pulled out from under me if I try to develop software with it. Yet they could put replica IIe machines on the market and I'd by 10 just to trick my hackerspace garage out -- help kids learn coding (JS is what I use now). The brand doesn't matter.

I'm a scientist. Before you go changing shit, I want some proof the change is needed. Consider for a moment that I don't give a toss about who serves my uploaded images or search requests or news feeds. No one does. I see a vacuum they could fill if they pulled their brains out of their ass: Throws their weight behind One API To Talk To Them All so folks can have the features they want everywhere regardless of service provider, and eliminates migration issues. That way whether you use img.ur or Flickr, it doesn't matter; That way whether you use G+ or Facebook, Twitter or identi.ca, it doesn't matter, whether you use any of these or your own servers to push the content... It won't matter. "Be The Platform" -- Don't be the salesman, be the market. Don't be the lender or borrower, be the bank.

Screw a brand. All end users really care about are features and benefits... Gimme a stable secure Unix (POSIX) server platform for a reasonable price and comparable feature-set, I'd buy an iServer, or run IIS.

Re:Of course

[Phreakiture]

Yahoo *could* stage a comeback, but why? What makes a product or service from Yahoo unique?

Well that's the key question right there now, innit?

Let's just suppose, for the sake of the argument, that they actually come up with a way to make some product or service that is unique. If they do that, they would be perfectly positioned to make a comeback.

On the other hand, let's suppose they do something else. What if their product isn't actually unique, as such, but that they somehow manage to out-google Google. Suppose they figure out a way to do something better? If they can do that, it won't matter if the product is unique as such; it could just be faster or better or both.

Re:Of course

[Dogtanian]

This is definitely true. It's another "Yahoo is passe and old hat, so they're doomed" story that misses one significant point.

As I pointed out myself a year back, Yahoo has been perceived as "yesterday's company" for a long, *long* time now. The feeling that (to quote the summary)...

Yahoo [is perceived as] teetering on the edge of history's trash-bin, with an aging customer base and unexciting features

... is *not* new. Essentially they've had that image as a stagnant, gone-nowhere-since-the-dotcom-era organisation since... well, since the dotcom era ended and Google rushed out of nowhere and left their overblown "portal" strategy in the dust.

And yet- as I pointed out- despite being perceived as moribund "has beens", they're still surviving and making good profits well over a decade after they went out of fashion. Some of this is no doubt due to "legacy" users who've been using Yahoo! Mail for years, but it's also worth remembering the companies they own that aren't prominently branded as "Yahoo" (*) yet still add to the bottom line. Yes, those were acquisitions, but if they're making profit, that's neither here nor there.

If Yahoo has survived and prospered despite its "stuck-in-the-dotcom-mud" image for 13 years, it's unlikely to disappear tomorrow. No, they're not fashionable, and possibly never will be again, but they're in the business of making money, not being poster boys.

(*) As I was typing this, I realised that mentally, I still associated the "Yahoo" logo with 256-colour dithered GIFs and the like, which emphasises the "stuck in the late-90s" image. And for those much younger (i.e. not old enough to remember the late-90s much if at all), does the Yahoo brand mean *anything*?

Re:Of course

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo *could* stage a comeback, but why? What makes a product or service from Yahoo unique?

Can't answer that question? Of course not. Yahoo is a holding company made up of numerous acquisitions. If there's an identity buried in there somewhere, it's a Frankenstein's monster, stitched together out of spare parts. There's nothing cohesive about Yahoo, nothing that makes it special as a company, and there never was.

===
I've been with yahoo.com since 199x I use it for personal email. I did like the legacy interface, which for my needs worked just fine. However, yahoo.com in their wisdom decided that enough was enough and forced a new interface on us. Much of what I used (view unread/all) is missing. There is a delete command at the end of a line, but do not use it. It sometimes deletes two lines at a time. (Mouse keyclick bounce). Then there is the wasted space on the screen, which is painful, given I often use a netbook. And last, not not the least is the scrolling of the save/delete, command line. I get to the bottom of my email, and I have to use the mouse to slide the view to the top, where I can enter send/delete.

Are they going to fix this, or leave me to not renew next year. My $20.00 was supposed to block adverts to me. So far, nothing is blocked, but my money is gone.

If you visit the website, there is absolutely no link that you may use to request human help. It makes me feel that they are already tits-up.

Re:Of course

[painandgreed]

Yahoo *could* stage a comeback, but why? What makes a product or service from Yahoo unique?

They don't have to do it uniquely. They just have to do it better. Google wasn't unique. Facebook wasn't unique. They both offered services that other companies were already in the lead for. People just seemed to like them better and switched. In the new world, web viewers are the commodity most these companies are fighting over, and it's just a matter of getting them to go to your site instead of somebody else's.

Re:Of course

[cheesybagel]

If she was a guy she would probably be called a douche rather than a bozo.

Re:Of course

[cheesybagel]

Sometimes I wonder how Cisco even has a business today. The powers that be must be getting nervous with all the recent trashtalk against Huawei and the like.

Google and IBM sure. Those are clearly successful companies which produce viable goods and services. But IBM does not handle its aquisitions particularly well either.

Re:Of course

[garett_spencley]

I'm going to back up your "So What?" with another point of view.

There is a perception that traditional "big business" has long understood, but that the big Internet corps like Yahoo and Google have yet to "get", and it holds that the less you focus the worse a job you will do.

Corporations like Procter & Gamble have solved the problem with heavy branding: Tide, Bounty, Charmin, Crest, Oral-B, etc., etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Procter_%26_Gamble_brands

Each brand exists as if it's a complete and separate company. While I doubt there's many people who haven't heard the name "Procter & Gamble", most people use their products without realizing that they're using a P&G product. Some P&G brands might even compete against each other.

There is no reason that Yahoo needs to "glue" it's products into some sort of "Yahoo identity." In fact, if the Yahoo! "brand" is dying, they could opt to kill it off entirely and go the branding route. Keep Flickr as "Flickr" and Tumblr as "Tumblr." They're solid brands unto themselves. I think that even gives Yahoo an edge because people, psychologically, become more likely to use something that stands on it's own rather than gets package-dealt with something else. For example, psychologically people tend to think "If Yahoo Search sucks then Yahoo sucks and so 'Yahoo Flickr' must suck too." Keep the branding separate. Flickr = Flickr, Tumblr = Tumblr and then only people who are really passionate about their reasons for liking or disliking specific corporations will care that Flickr and Tumblr just happen to be owned by Yahoo.

Google has a really good thing going with Youtube, as a brand, and should *not* try and integrate it with the Google name in any way. Notice how many steps in that direction have resulted in negative blow-back. Like trying to force people to use their real names for comments, and link their Youtube accounts with a Google account. I used to have a registered Youtube account, I don't anymore because of that. Gmail was a success story, and in some ways it might qualify as a brand unique from "Google", but people think of "Google" as a search engine. They'd be better off keeping it that way. Blogspot should stay Blogspot, Chrome should stay Chrome. There's no reason not to drop the "Google" name from each of those brands entirely and let them stand on their own. While this is pure conjecture, I kind of suspect that Google Plus may have had a slightly better chance of succeeding as a Facebook killer if they had done a better job with branding, and not associated it with Google. It should have focused entirely on what separates it from Facebook and makes it *unique and compelling* instead of "Hey Google has one too!" ... the appropriate response to that was "so what?"

Apple is a total anomaly in the world of branding. They've created an "Apple Identity" and their indivdual brands have been able to benefit from that. But it also puts their individual brands in potential jeopardy becuase if the Apple brand takes a hit it's more likely to trickle down to their individual products.

Yahoo could be very successful as a holding company with many unique brands that each focus on their own individual "identity." They don't need to integrate a thing or attach the Yahoo name to any of them. Just let each product shine on it's own.

Re:Of course

[PlastikMissle]

"Bimbo" is miles different in meaning and connotation from "Bozo". "Bimbo", as I'm sure you well know, is derogatory term used to denote sexual promiscuity. Calling Mayers a bad business woman is one thing, but casting doubt on her sexual practices is uncalled for and if anything is indicative of the gross chauvinism in the geek world. And for the record I'm a guy.

Re:Of course

[Anonymous Coward]

[citation needed]

Here ya go:
http://www.google.com

Re:Of course

[Grishnakh]

"Bimbo", as I'm sure you well know, is derogatory term used to denote sexual promiscuity.

No, it's not. I don't know where you got that. Where I come from, "bimbo" basically translates to "female airhead". It's also a synonym for "ditz". It has nothing to do with sexual practices or promiscuity.

Re:Of course

[metlin]

For someone at risk of descending into irrelevancy, any PR is good PR. There's a reason actresses of a certain age and caliber (or the lack thereof) start doing stupid sh*t.

Re:Of course

[Hentes]

I have no idea how can they make that much with the business model of buying up sites already past their peak, but apparently it works.

Re:Of course

[tlambert]

(AC due to moderation) These days, "bozo" is a unisex word referring to someone that behaves foolishly; most people under 50 are unaware it's an old reference to a clown.

Sorry, but how do those people you posit get the "What has red hair and lives in a test tube? Bozo the clone" joke?

Also: under 50.

Can they?

[tftp]

It all depends on people. We (outsiders) don't know what caliber of people Yahoo has and what they are thinking. Therefore we cannot answer the question.

Re:Can they?

[game kid]

Plus between trade secrets and accounting wonkery there's simply no way for anyone short of a spy behind a Bloomberg terminal to have an idea what'll happen.

In brief, this article is SOP for the Lobster.

Sure they can!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's just very unlikely!

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines

[Anonymous Coward]

Ya, but this isn't really a headline... it's an Ask Slashdot question.

the new flickr interface

[Anonymous Coward]

is a complete and utter disaster.

Re:the new flickr interface

[Anonymous Coward]

is a complete and utter disaster.

No, it's not.

Re:the new flickr interface

[0123456]

Yes, it is. It's a horrible Metroised mess of pictures that trades function for shiny.

Re:the new flickr interface

[longk]

Function doesn't make money per se. Shiny often does.

Asking around, most people in my corner of the world seem to like the new interface.

Re:the new flickr interface

[rwa2]

So what's better?

I'm kinda annoyed that Google+ automatically uploads everything from my phone's camera gallery, but there's not really a good way to pull down from my Picasa albums shared on Google+ to my phone's Gallery, without swimming through a bunch of third-party apps.

FWIW, the only "third party" picture interface app that I've really liked is "Floating Image", which can pull from various feeds including Facebook and Flickr and probably Picasa / Google+ / or whatever passes for Google's photo service du jour. But it pulls to its own cache dir rather than to your Gallery.

Re:the new flickr interface

[Anonymous Coward]

Well shiny is not going to make any money from me. I can no longer find my messages without scrolling through a whole pile of crap. If I can't get what I need without going through a whole pile of tedium and frustration, and I can't, then I'm out of there.

Re:the new flickr interface

[istartedi]

You could get a very similar look years ago on Flickriver, Flickrhivemind, and probably a few other places. People have been using the APIs to create that look. The latter has infinite scrolling, and they both put your pictures on a black background and hide your comments.

Yes folks, Flickr's big innovation essentially takes something that 3rd parties have been doing, and forces it on users.

Hey here's an idea--maybe somebody can use the APIs to recreate Flickr's old interface, and save it from itself... at least until they take the APIs away. You know that's coming. As for me, I'm done.

It'll take a while to verify that I've extracted my 876 pictures and metadata properly. I feel sorry for the real professionals who have thousands of pictures up there.

As for making money, yeah sure. Budweiser sells a lot of beer; but they don't barge into your favorite brewpub, stick a funnel down your throat and start pouring.

Re:the new flickr interface

[Anonymous Coward]

No, They barge into your favorite non brewpub, hang out with the owners and managers, play some golf, and secure the tap handles needed.

Maybe... The problem is going to be MS.

[Anonymous Coward]

They really really have to get their own search engine going again.

How quickly can they de-crap their products?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo's offerings seem like a trashy, awful version of Google's and MS's services.

Look at gmail. Clean. Simple. Functional.
Hotm- Err Outlook.com Like gmail, but more elegant and stylish. (Not a huge MS fan, but they really have stepped it up on a lot of their products)
Look at yahoo mail. Hey! You know what? I really missed that old 90s AOL feel. All those sidebars and banners really are something. Best, I like the site trying to force-install the yahoo toolbar at ev- (That sound your hearing is my brain trying to escape out my eye sockets so it can strangle me and prevent me from completing this tasteless joke)

Point is, yahoo needs to abandon it's entire image and start from scratch. Stop trying to monetize every pixel on the screen with increasingly obtrusive, tasteless, and gaudy crap. Treat your users like they actually have someplace else to turn to. Because they do. And they are. Yeah, I know google and MS are also making money off me by watching my every twitch.. But at least they're nice and subtle about it.

The question is not what more can Yahoo do, but what less.

Re:How quickly can they de-crap their products?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a totally off-topic rant. How does this answer the question "Is Yahoo capable of an Apple-style turnaround, or are its current actions merely delaying the inevitable?"

Re:How quickly can they de-crap their products?

[tompaulco]

Look at gmail. Clean. Simple. Functional.

Well, with g-mails latest changes (admittedly a year old now), the question in my mind is whether yahoo can maintain status quo long enough for Google to shoot themselves in the foot by making their product more crappy.

Re:How quickly can they de-crap their products?

[mrmeval]

I agree with the other poster. Goggle will fuck up gmail. They've already driven me from the web version. I predict they'd trash pop/imap access within six months either with much more intrusive adspam or just turning it off.

Re:How quickly can they de-crap their products?

[Anonymous Coward]

... Well, with g-mails latest changes (admittedly a year old now), the question in my mind is whether yahoo can maintain status quo long enough for Google to shoot themselves in the foot by making their product more crappy.

I'm a member of a few special interest Yahoo Groups. They seem to work OK, nothing great, but they could be a lot better if they were faster and had better search/index capability. Again, all they have to do is be a little better than Google.

Re:How quickly can they de-crap their products?

[wisnoskij]

It does not matter how crappy Google gets, it will still be Google and Yahoo with still be Yahoo. Look at Firefox, it takes at least 3 years for people to abandon a completely crappy app that used to be good for something that is better.

Yahoo would simultaneously have to revolutionized emailing, while Google rapidly sinks to utter crap, and you would still only see 1/3-1/2 market share transfer over the preceding couple years.

Re:How quickly can they de-crap their products?

[ADRA]

Just look at the new G-talk to Hangouts conversion. Big shot in the face there. I've talked to insiders and even they're irrate over the changes.. you know its bad when...

Re:How quickly can they de-crap their products?

[Grishnakh]

Google would have to do some serious foot-shooting to make their product more crappy than Yahoo mail. Yes, Gmail's new UI sucks donkey balls, but it's nowhere near as bad as Yahoo's gaudy crap.

And why hasn't someone made some Greasemonkey script or extension to fix Gmail anyway? Surely it can be done somehow.

Re:How quickly can they de-crap their products?

[ADRA]

Dude, Firefox has worked as well as it always has. Just because its not your cup of tea doesn't make it crappy. One could say the same about IE if you really liked the product differentiation(I'd never, but I can understand the argument) then who am I to say differently.

Should we all go out and use Unity, Gnome3, Windows8 just because its new and shiny? No. We use what works for us, and if you don't like it then at least keep the smug to yourself.

Re:How quickly can they de-crap their products?

[Anonymous Coward]

it cant, thats the op's point, yahoo is a junky pile of garbage that keeps growing and forcing itself onto you, why do we want it to grow?

  do not use

Re:How quickly can they de-crap their products?

[wisnoskij]

No, it is objectively worse than it used to be.
It is even worse than Unity, though I think Windows 8 beats them both.

Re:How quickly can they de-crap their products?

[Osgeld]

I liked firefox, but now its firechrome, cept not as slick ... so I just started using chrome since I fucking have to anyway as all the browsers are falling overthemselves to be just like chrome

Re:How quickly can they de-crap their products?

[steelfood]

The newest versions of Firefox aren't horrible, but it got a bit rough a few versions back. I do wish they'd bring back the status bar though. Everything else has otherwise settled down into something fairly decent and quite usable.

Google, however, is settling into a "we are Google, we can do anything we want and you just have to suck it" mode. They're treating nobody well at this point, neither their customers nor their users. It's only a matter of time before somebody a bit nicer comes along and eats their lunch.

Re:How quickly can they de-crap their products?

[magic maverick]

Status-4-evar is the addon you want. I installed in when forcibly upgraded to 10 (Ubuntu LTS stayed with 3.6 until it hit unsupported status). It's great. I for one can't understand why the removed it. And I can't understand at all why Safari on Mac doesn't even show the URL when you hover over a link. (It's not my Mac, fuck Apple with a chainsaw, but I do use it sometimes.)

Re:How quickly can they de-crap their products?

[Xest]

"Dude, Firefox has worked as well as it always has. Just because its not your cup of tea doesn't make it crappy."

I think the GP was referring to the fact that Firefox has seen a decline in marketshare in recent years, it not being his cup of tea may not make it crappy, but it actually being crappy is why people have flocked away from it to Chrome.

Re:How quickly can they de-crap their products?

[Anonymous Coward]

At some point, most companies will appoint some idiot to make stupid changes that piss off people.
It could be Google Drive Preview, it could be New Coke.

Good companies learn from these mistakes, bad companies refuse to admit they were a mistake.

Re:How quickly can they de-crap their products?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just wish that Firefox would stop trying to push the "tabs on top are better because we say so" crap every time I install it. No longer even a setting for it in the options menu, you have to go into about:config every time to fix it.

Re:How quickly can they de-crap their products?

[Anonymous Coward]

When people say "objectively", they usually offer an objective reason. Does it crash more frequently, load pages slower, offer fewer options?

Re:How quickly can they de-crap their products?

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at gmail. Clean. Simple. Functional.

Well, with g-mails latest changes (admittedly a year old now), the question in my mind is whether yahoo can maintain status quo long enough for Google to shoot themselves in the foot by making their product more crappy.

Gmail has become an utter cluttered mess. Then take G+, please?

Wall Street's answer

[Anonymous Coward]

If you look at this chart, things look pretty good.

Things get progressively rosy so when you then click on the 2-year, 5-year, and Max historical perspective on the same page.

Re:Wall Street's answer

[Anonymous Coward]

oops s/rosy/less rosy/

YAHOO! ??

[Anonymous Coward]

I have never used Yahoo! !!

I do not know what Yahoo! does !!

Do you ??

Re:YAHOO! ??

[Spy Handler]

i used it all the time. It used to have a human-submitted and maintained tree directory of the internet.

Think about that for a second.

So if I wanted to find a good website about DOS games, instead of googling for "DOS Games", I would go to Yahoo and select a top category. It might be "Entertainment".

And find subcategories, such as Games -> Computer Games -> Legacy Games -> DOS

And look through the listings.

Re:YAHOO! ??

[Osgeld]

yea it might be entertainment, it might be something else, you might spend lots of time being bombarded by ad's while finding nothing at all

Re:YAHOO! ??

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. It was originally a hand maintained directory of quality websites a long long long time ago. I don't remember exactly when it changed to a search engine. Dmoz was a good directory but I haven't used it in a very long time.

Gmail vs Yahoo email - Yahoo mail's spam filter sucks.

Re:YAHOO! ??

[Anonymous Coward]

In theory, maybe. In practice it worked just fine. It just wasn't very fast to update and required lots of human beings to accomplish.

Re:YAHOO! ??

[Anonymous Coward]

i used it all the time. It used to have a human-submitted and maintained tree directory of the internet.

Think about that for a second.

So if I wanted to find a good website about DOS games, instead of googling for "DOS Games", I would go to Yahoo and select a top category. It might be "Entertainment".

And find subcategories, such as Games -> Computer Games -> Legacy Games -> DOS

And look through the listings.

I'm glad that works for you. I just go to Google and type in "DOS games legacy". It takes about 10 seconds from start to finish to get a hit... Or I can spend a minute navigating menus using your suggestion, and I have to understand, interpret and click the damn things.

I like Google because I can find most things with a few words ... it's almost 10 times quicker than your suggestion, and requires almost no brain power.

Re:YAHOO! ??

[Spy Handler]

It worked for me in 1996. There was no Google for you to google back then. But around 98, I switched Altavista, that was the new hotness. It was kind of like a proto-google.

Re:YAHOO! ??

[cheesybagel]

Back in 1996 there wasn't Altavista but there were other search engines like Lycos (crap) and Hotbot (actually quite good).

The plan

[MetalliQaZ]

1) Make copycat Internet company (say... copy Pandora)
2) Name it after a verb with a grammatically incorrect "er" (how about... Castr)
3) Get bought by Yahoo
4) Profit!

Both of coursee

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Yahoo capable of an Apple-style turnaround, or are its current actions merely delaying the inevitable?

Obviously a turnaround is possible and obviously that will only delay the inevitable. Yahoo won't be around forever. Neither will Apple. But with the right management and good fortune then they might both outlast us.

No.

[bmo]

TLDR: no.

Longer answer: No.

Why?

Leadership. There is none.

So... no.

--
BMO

Re:No.

[Bohnanza]

She is hot, though.

Re:No.

[interkin3tic]

Indeed. Apple, EA, MS, Facebook, AT&T, Verizon and Sony for example all insulted their customer bases in various ways, some of which were outright insults in press conferences, and immediately went belly up. ~

Flickr can, in fact, get rid of the high-power users in exchange for more of the instagram crowd and gain marketshare and profits. The changes seem to be aimed squarely at that. Yahoo undoubtedly has far more data on their users than we do. Whether the decision is based on a reasonable interpretation of that data or whether they're all braindead idiots (or some combination) only time will tell, but I don't think it's certain that insulting a small part of their user base in a press conference will doom them.

Re:No.

[Anonymous Coward]

The only reason why she got anywhere is because she used to fuck Sergrey Brin.

Re:No.

[Anonymous Coward]

In what world? Have you ever actually seen any females if you think that old milf is hot?

Re:No.

[Anonymous Coward]

i've seen this quote angrily thrown about for the past several days. funny, though, not by any actual 'professional photographers'.

Re:No.

[Anonymous Coward]

In a weird, psycho kind of way. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcSujceZDmg

Re:No.

[Myopic]

She's hot in a world where this is hot:

http://www.therichest.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/marissa-mayer.jpg

Everyone is entitled to their own sexual opinions, but when graded on a curve of American CEOs, judged by American hetero men, she's hot.

Comeback?

[Anonymous Coward]

That implys they had something once...
And.... no.. no they didnt. this is yahoo we're talking about here.

The ultimate 'metoo' company. You have search? we have that too! metoo! You have email? metoo! stock info? metoo! blogs? chat? dating? metoo!!!!!

The sad part is that for all their attempts at... everything... they've never once done better than half assed lame copy attempts at being trendy/cool/popular...

The only way they could have something that DIDN'T suck would be to buy hoover and produce a vacuum.

Re:Comeback?

[Grishnakh]

Dating? Do they even still do that? I remember Yahoo Personals in the early-mid 2000s, but it was a disaster, because most of the "women" on there weren't real. They eventually shut it down, as I remember.

Re:Comeback?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dating? Do they even still do that? I remember Yahoo Personals in the early-mid 2000s, but it was a disaster, because most of the "women" on there weren't real. They eventually shut it down, as I remember.

The women I met there were real... a couple of nice dates, two of which led somewhere. I was pretty happy with the service.

Re:Comeback?

[schlachter]

Dating? Yea, I think the kids still do that. Not sure though.

no it can't

[Anonymous Coward]

yahoo will be gone within 5 years. mark this post.

YHOO stock is up almost 100% since Marissa came on

[Anonymous Coward]

That is already quite the turn around.

Still nothing about the ipad?

[interkin3tic]

They redesigned their webpage? Well great, approximately no one was complaining about the page being ugly. Meanwhile flickr has yet to embrace this tablet trend. That's right, there's still no ipad app. If you want to use your ipad to look at your photos... you can do that. Using the iphone app. Half resolution.

I'm really surprised at that. Tablets are good for little more than looking at pictures and video, and the ipad is the most popular tablet. Annoucing a revamp of flickr by redesigning the front page and not by improving tablet support is a little like announcing you're going to fight street crime by enforcing jaywalking laws and saying nothing about drugs, guns, or gang activity.

Re:Still nothing about the ipad?

[hawaiian717]

Or, you can use Safari. I have both an iPad 3 and an iPhone, and find that site-specific apps are far less necessary on the iPad, since the screen is big enough that most sites work reasonably well. As to whether that is the case with Flickr site specifically, I'm not sure.

Re:Still nothing about the ipad?

[interkin3tic]

Also true. And i haven't tried the new site with the ipad. Maybe it is better. Alright, I realize that it's not really that important. Still, odd exception.

Posterboy for corporate failure

[BeCre8iv]

Once upon a time... one website was so well funded and ubiquitous it was like it was like hotmail, ebay, facebook, match.com, with the social vocabulary of youtube. all rolled into one.

Somewhere along the line they have been reduced to paying Murdochesque sums for last-gen products. having destroyed everything it ever created for itself.

At least the extra special yahoo trolls are still around

Re:Posterboy for corporate failure

[bmo]

>At least the extra special yahoo trolls are still around

Yeah, the groups are even more of a sewer now than they were before.

The MSFT board on finance.yahoo is unreadable. It used to be populated by smart people (11-12 years ago) but it has since devolved into flamewars about concrete among other things, and if you ever want to find out what an Unreconstructed Southern Democrat thinks, go there.

*gag*

--
BMO

Not really..

[Rhurazz12]

If you ask me, it's too little too late. I think that Mayer has potential to make it for a company, just not Yahoo. Google on the other hand..

Destroyed Flickr

[Beer_Smurf]

The new Flickr update turns it into Facebook. It is now totally worthless as a photo site. There are hundreds of pages of scathing posts in the comments on the new layout.

Come back to what?

[longk]

Can it grow? Sure. Can it grow significantly? Sure! Can it be the next Facebook/Google? Maybe.. doubtful.

Re:Come back to what?

[roc97007]

Facebook can't even be the next Facebook, these days.

Open Letter to Marissa

[Seumas]

If you really want to improve the perception of the Yahoo! brand, you need to make HardGay an official part of your company's imaging. Why this didn't happen years ago, I have no idea!

HardGay Goes To Yahoo!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSD8edviajE

Re:Open Letter to Marissa

[Anonymous Coward]

too bad he came out of the closet and admitted he was straight.

Re:Open Letter to Marissa

[cameloid]

Old Skool. It's all about GOLDEN BOMBER! now.

delaying the inevitable...

[roc97007]

Well, of course it's actions are delaying the inevitable. That's all any company's actions do. Just like, we're all dying, just some faster than others.

Can you buy a comeback ?

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Comebacks don't start by acquisition.

Reform the current operation before trying to graft on something else.

If Yahoo was going to trying to acquire talent in order to bolster their management (ala Disney buying Pixar), then do it. But from the get go they've said that Tumblr will stay independent, which probably means no sharing of the management...

Tumblr, meet Flikr, GeoCities and Summly...

Re:Can you buy a comeback ?

[Lumpy]

"Reform the current operation before trying to graft on something else."

The need to start by firing everyone on the executive floor of the offices. the Board needs to hire all new blood that has a clue how to run a technology business.

They blew a golden opportunity

[Tablizer]

Yahoo had the perfect opportunity for roll-your-sites and social networks. Geocities and related services were popular in the late 90's, but they didn't improve the products, such as making them more click-to-build etc. so users didn't have to learn HTML. They sat on it and it rotted. They also had a reputation for crappy customer service. They could have been the next Facebook + Google.

Re:They blew a golden opportunity

[Ash-Fox]

but they didn't improve the products, such as making them more click-to-build etc. so users didn't have to learn HTML.

They did actually. Please stop lying.

Re:They blew a golden opportunity

[Anonymous Coward]

Hindsight is always 20/20, isn't it.

You know some people used to call the Internet a fad?

Re:They blew a golden opportunity

[Tablizer]

Let me reword it: "They didn't significantly improve it".

Re:They blew a golden opportunity

[Tablizer]

It seemed pretty obvious at the time that if you made it easier for the masses to create web-pages without HTML coding, more will come. If that idea never crossed the minds of the top executives, then they truly were fools.

Re:They blew a golden opportunity

[Ash-Fox]

Let me reword it: "They didn't significantly improve it".

The paid editions were actually improved often (and as a whole, I think they were significantly improved) and are now part of smallbusiness.yahoo.com.

Re:They blew a golden opportunity

[Tablizer]

But geocities was originally free, and one can go to blogspot etc. these days. Geocities could have morphed into something similar to blogspot, maybe with ads for Yahoo revenue.

Re:They blew a golden opportunity

[Ash-Fox]

But geocities was originally free

And then they improved it with some paid services.

Geocities could have morphed into something similar to blogspot, maybe with ads for Yahoo revenue.

Why would they do that when they have Yahoo! Blog?

Re:They blew a golden opportunity

[Tablizer]

They were slow to get it out and early versions were hard to use.

Re:They blew a golden opportunity

[Ash-Fox]

They were slow to get it out and early versions were hard to use.

I wouldn't know, seemed easy.

That didn't stop...

[Molochi]

Apple.

Parts can...

[Darkness404]

Parts of Yahoo can certainly survive and thrive, but the problem is, Yahoo has no cohesion when compared to Google/MS. Parts of Yahoo are actually quite good like Flickr, but then there's parts of Yahoo that are absolute crap when compared to Google and Microsoft's offerings such as their e-mail service.

Re:Parts can...

[TrollstonButterbeans]

It's true.

Re:Parts can...

[cheesybagel]

Actually they changed their e-mail interface recently. It seems to have lost some features however. I particularly liked the old feature where you could have more than one alias for the same account : helped to reduce spam. I haven't seen this feature elsewhere. At one time I used Yahoo as my primary e-mail account. I only stopped using it because of the e-mail quota limits were much lower than gmail back then. I used to backup my e-mail every month but with gmail I have grown too lazy to do it raising the barrier to changing e-mail providers.

Give what Google does not

[Anonymous Coward]

Give me better privacy controls than Google does, and I will make the switch.

I would really like a social network that allows me to either:

a) allow the company to use my personal data for advertising as normal
b) pay a small subscription fee, but stay completely private.

If I pick B and my subscription lapses, the service is SUSPENDED until I pay, it does not default to A.

Furthermore, I can set up a charge list, so anyone who wants to contact me through the network has to pay an upfront fee which gets stored in escrow until:

1) I refund it (at no cost to me)
2) I accept it (goes to my bank).
3) I wait too long (automatic refund).

And I get to set the fee and possibly set a few different fees by category of the contactor. Also, obviously, I can whitelist people on my contact list so they can always contact me for free (but membership to the whitelist does not automatically whitelist).

I could go on, but why? This is far too awesome to ever be made available to us serfs.

Re:Give what Google does not

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want a social network. Who does?

Twitter, not that I use it, is sufficient as a social network. It lets groups communicate amongst themselves. Ad-hoc groups, not constrained by circles or 'friend' status; not using some everything-and-the-kitchen-sink website as their meeting grounds. Facebook and Google+ are as bad as AOL ever was. Walled gardens are huge step backwards and, I would argue, brittle and unlasting forms of technology.

In real life people don't have lists of friends, people don't all socialize in the same place all time. People come and go, groups grow and shrink, individuals make their own 'groups' through their actions, just by listening or by visiting.

Facebook is completely artificial, Google+ is a bastard child of an artificial thing.

The essential actions one performs when socializing online are sharing media - photos, videos, bits of text - with groups of people. All any tool needs to do to make this possible is provide some way of making media accessible, with access controls.

Surely it should be possible to create a patent-free standard for this, using public keys to provide access control?

Re:Give what Google does not

[Anonymous Coward]

What's your username?

No.

[Lumpy]

Not with the complete Moron CEO they have. That woman has no idea how to run a business. You do NOT insult your customers to gain market share...

Her Comments , “There’s no such thing as Flickr Pro today because [with so many people taking photographs] there’s really no such thing as professional photographers anymore...”

I really hope someone told her that she was a complete idiot for saying those words at a press conference.

*** IT IS TIME FOR REVOLUTION ***

[jimmetry]

This means they can FINALLY drop that stupid fucking question mark! :D

Re:*** IT IS TIME FOR REVOLUTION ***

[jimmetry]

Wait. Exclamation mark.

Dammit.

Re:*** IT IS TIME FOR REVOLUTION ***

[Anonymous Coward]

Who's the stupid one now, bitch?

Re:YHOO stock is up almost 100% since Marissa came

[Anonymous Coward]

Any fuckwit with an MBA(sorry, that's redundant) can boost stock at a large publicly traded company.

Just fire a bunch of people. Short term profits jump as you burn off the 4-6 months of residual work benefit from said canned employees, without having to pay them. The stock market fucking loves this.

Of course this benefit is only temporary, and the company suffers in the long run.. But hey, in two quarters you can always fire some more people, make your bonus gain.. And when people finally catch on, several iterations down the line, you exit with your golden parachute and make even more money.

Ever wonder why some people think America is doomed?

With Facebook integration as bad as this...

[torndorff2433]

To add facebook to my Flickr account, it _only_ wants access to this: Yahoo! would like to access your public profile, friend list, News Feed, birthday, work history, status updates, education history, events, groups, interests, current city, religious and political views, personal description, likes and your friends' birthdays, work histories, status updates, education histories, events and current cities. Yahoo! would like to post on your behalf. O.o Get with the times

Raise the pirate flag.

[Sponge Bath]

The new and improved Yarrrrhoo! can embrace a new synergy of proactive distributed cloud sharing. 'Rissa Dot Com, CEO for a new era.

Re:Raise the pirate flag.

[Anonymous Coward]

I just wanted to know how you type while sucking off a guy. You must be a pretty skilled dick smoker.

Re:YHOO stock is up almost 100% since Marissa came

[KGIII]

I looked recently and IIRC their stock is about back to where it was five years ago.

What would they come back to?

[AdamHaun]

Apple started off making computers (or maybe "integrated hardware/software experiences" is a better way to put it). After their comeback, they still made computers. Now their big thing is portable computers -- a big change, but still related to what they always did. Their focus is on design and UX expertise.

Yahoo started off making a hierarchical directory of web sites, then dove into the web portal craze of the late 1990s. After their comeback, they will ___________. Their focus is on ___________.

Fill in the blanks. It's not going to be what they did before, because nobody wants more hierarchical web directories and portals. They have a bunch of people still using their webmail, so that's one option. GMail wiped the floor with them before, but it's been getting clunky lately thanks to G+. Yahoo could try to recapture the clean simplicity of Google's early days. That would be a big challenge indeed -- as a portal company, the idea of leaving blank space on a web page is utterly alien to them.

It looks like they're producing independent news. That's an interesting option -- they could compete with the Huffington Post et al. Online news is still based strongly on newspapers, so there's room for someone to shake up the format.

This all seems like a stretch, though. Yahoo's name has little value, and their current expertise isn't very helpful. All they bring to the table is more money than a startup, but it probably won't be enough to save them. Then again, that's what I said about Apple too.

Re:What would they come back to?

[neurovish]

social and cloud?

Re:What would they come back to?

[hyperfl0w]

"nobody wants hierarchical web directories" Tim Berners Lee sure does ('inventor' of WWW) -- to the degree that he is spending all his political capital on the Semantic Web.

Re:What would they come back to?

[hyperfl0w]

After their comeback, they will ___________. Their focus is on ___________.

After their comeback, they will HIRE Time Berners Lee. Their focus is on the Semantic Web.

Why would the inventor of the WWW work for Yahoo?
Because you give him ALL the resources to make his dream a coherent reality.

Long shot for sure, but its what I would do.

Re:What would they come back to?

[steelfood]

What saved Apple was a leader with creativity and vision, and a rabid fan base.

I don't know if Yahoo has the former, but I can tell you with certainty that they don't have the latter. They have a solid user base, but they're by no means fans. Which means that they cannot afford to make as many mistakes as Apple could.

Re:What would they come back to?

[cheesybagel]

Its called Wikipedia dude.

Re:What would they come back to?

[AdamHaun]

After their comeback, they will HIRE Time Berners Lee. Their focus is on the Semantic Web.

To what end, though? Isn't the Semantic Web something that happens across the whole web? What about that gets Yahoo more ad impressions?

Re:What would they come back to?

[Anonymous Coward]

YAHOO finance is a GOTO place. Market professionals use the crap out of YAHOO.

Betteridge's Law

[Anonymous Coward]

Answer:

No.

Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

Look! Free stuff!

[neurovish]

...in the meantime, they're throwing ads on the site unless you want to pay $50/year (current, well former, cost for Pro with unlimited storage is $25/year), and if you want twice as much space, then that will be $500. Personally, I was fine with the way that flickr was. Now I need a plan to rescue all my photos on there while I wait and see if I want to stick around the new ad-based site.

I am not hip

[Taantric]

Can someone explain the difference between Flickr & Tumblr? To a jaded old fool like me they sound pretty much the same.

Re:I am not hip

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone explain the difference between Flickr & Tumblr? To a jaded old fool like me they sound pretty much the same.

Fucklr?

Re:I am not hip

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone explain the difference between Flickr & Tumblr? To a jaded old fool like me they sound pretty much the same.

Tumblr is where you tell people what you had for lunch.

Flickr is where you show people what you had for lunch.

The problem yahoo has is

[hsmith]

There is no service they offer I'd go to use. Not search, not email. They don't have an OS. Love or hate MS, they at least have draw. There isn't much that would get me to use Yahoos services.

Re:The problem yahoo has is

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no service they offer I'd go to use. Not search, not email. They don't have an OS. Love or hate MS, they at least have draw. There isn't much that would get me to use Yahoos services.

And yet, this apparently worthless company amassed 3.75 billion reasons to keep doing what everyone else...isn't.

Love or hate finance, it's hard to argue with their numbers. You can try, but you probably won't succeed.

Yes

[sunking2]

As soon as Marissa posts her sex pics on a yahoo advertisement driven website. Or maybe she's not really behind the cause afterall?

Yahoo! threw their Flickr users overboard

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using Flickr since 2004 (Flickr just told me) which was *before* Yahoo! bought it. It's been upgraded and had a few features added over the years, but it's always been a great place to store my photos and share them on the web. I've been a paying user of Flickr for many years.

Today, I got an email about the free terabyte of space I can get and suggesting that I convert my account to a free one while the offer lasts. WTF?! Is that? Why am I paying them? If I switch to free, what assurance is there that they won't just shut down the site one day?

A better question that makes all of this simple: how do I get all my original photos off Flickr and where should I put them?

So far, I've put them in Dropbox and AWS and my own openstack cloud storage, but what's the best place to share them with others?

signed,
disappointed Flickr fan

Re:Yahoo! threw their Flickr users overboard

[thetoadwarrior]

Wow someone's disappointed he no longer has to pay for his photo storage. So much butt hurt for no good reason. Given yahoo's state I don't think paying for a Flickr account would make it any more safe.

The Dot-Com v1.0 Poster Boy That wouldn't die

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo is a strange beast, really. Sort of a Web 1.0 poster boy that has substantially ridden its late '90s successes into the modern era. They did make a few smart bets (Alibaba and others) that have given them a fairly large cash horde to play around with (e.g., buy Mark Cuban's rather pointless broadcast.com in the late '90s for $2B (more than Tumblr!) for no good reason and unfortunately made him the billionaire pro ball-owning douche bag he is today. I'm continually puzzled why they're still around and what the heck they are doing. Basically everything they have seems to exist to exploit an ad-serving infrastructure. They still have massive, massive traffic - which obviously has SOME considerable value - but as far as what they are or what they're about, it's utterly puzzling. Terry Semel really took them into a weird direction and very, very richly lined his bank account in the process, attempting to make Yahoo a "media company." For all intents and purposes it's a Silicon Dark Alley, with a few $B in the bank still (much less after the Tumblr acquisition, but still quite a bit), attempting to find its way out of the hole.

i used to cyber with her

[Anonymous Coward]

on yahoo chat, it was awesome - still have screen caps. But im not a dick to release them.

Re:i used to cyber with her

[Anonymous Coward]

ya, and *I* fucked her in the ass, took her to a hockey game, and watched her dress up in a "bimbo-the-clown" outfit as she washed my car with a toothbrush and a feather duster.

But since you're not a dick, I won't release the hd vid.

Re:i used to cyber with her

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and I'm the King of England.

Can't move forwards by looking backwards.

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree -- I was surprised to read the email to their flickr pro users letting me know that my money was wasted. If you read between the lines, they really just don't care, I guess.

I really really doubt all the flickr pro users were professional photographers -- how deluded is that idea?

Not that long ago, there was the Peanut Butter Manifesto where VPs at Yahoo! discussed the layer of Yahoo! spread over all the products but nothing's integrated. At that time, Yahoo! had Photos and had just acquired Flickr. They also had Yahoo! Bookmarks and had just acquired Delicious. In the end, yphotos merged into flickr and bookmarks was supported by the team who ran delicious when they were merged. y!groups also has a photos storage system which isn't integrated with delicious, flickr or photos.

strangely, all of these make just enough money and are complex enough that it's not possible to successfully change things

it will take years and years for the steam to be let out, but I'll be shocked if anything revolutionary gets done there again.

  Can't move forwards by looking backwards.

from money.cnn.com today

[KernelMuncher]

I think I see a trend here:

http://money.cnn.com/gallery/magazines/fortune/2013/05/21/5-worst-internet-acquisitions-of-all-time.fortune/index.html

TOP 5 WORST INTERNET ACQUISITIONS

Yahoo bough Broadcast.com, an online television site founded by Mark Cuban, for $5.7 billion in 1999

Yahoo acquired GeoCities for $3.6 billion

TOP 5 BEST INTERNET ACQUISITIONS

Google's acquisition of Android, the mobile operating system maker, was miniscule at an estimated $50 million. But the deal eight years ago turned out to be the foundation for Google's Android operating system now used in 75% of all smartphones and more than half of all tablets sold.

Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006. According to one analyst, it took in $2.4 billion last year

Google bought DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in 2008. The deal helped Google expand from search advertising to selling much bigger ads that appear on partner websites. DoubleClick has an expected 17.6% U.S. market share this year -- greater than Yahoo and Facebook.

Good reason for working local....

[tlambert]

Good reason for working local....

You can not inculcate a corporate culture change with remote workers without at least a token presence at the ground zero. It just does not work to state that "the company has changed" without forced acknowledgement that it has changed.

Marissa did the right thing here, even though it's not clear her overall direction is "the right thing". Remote workers do not "buy it" and if they don't, everything breaks down. Not sure that her direction is right, but pointing "there" instead of "somewhere over there, I won't be there" is a net win.

Re:Good reason for working local....

[Tough Love]

I'm just amazed by the fervor of the Marissa apologists. Marissa did an obviously stupid thing which is sure to bite Yahoo on the ass. Everybody knows what the problem is at Yahoo with lazy, tenured senior engineers. Cancelling remote was just stupid, the real problem is letting the slackers get away with it. Now they will just slack in the office and Marissa will be perfectly happy. Meanwhile, anybody with talent will be thinking twice about hanging around at Yahoo waiting for the next stupid edict. She got booted from the executive suite at Google for doing stupid things too. If she plays her cards right she will be out of Yahoo before the shit hits the fan and on to her next victim smelling like a rose.

Re:Good reason for working local....

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile, anybody with talent will be thinking twice about hanging around at Yahoo waiting for the next stupid edict.

I hate to break it to you, but all the talent left Yahoo years ago. All that's left at Yahoo now, are the stale leftovers, and new vultures looking for a quick score. The former will turn off the lights when it goes under, the latter will be gone in a year.

Re:Good reason for working local....

[tlambert]

I'm just amazed by the fervor of the Marissa apologists. Marissa did an obviously stupid thing which is sure to bite Yahoo on the ass. Everybody knows what the problem is at Yahoo with lazy, tenured senior engineers. Cancelling remote was just stupid, the real problem is letting the slackers get away with it. Now they will just slack in the office and Marissa will be perfectly happy. Meanwhile, anybody with talent will be thinking twice about hanging around at Yahoo waiting for the next stupid edict. She got booted from the executive suite at Google for doing stupid things too. If she plays her cards right she will be out of Yahoo before the shit hits the fan and on to her next victim smelling like a rose.

The people I know are pretty much geniuses,

Peter Wemm is a genius.

I am not a fan of Marissa; she has this anti-genius bias that will bite her in the mediocrity. I can definitely see why she has made the decisions she did, however. Normal nerd vs. genius nerd is a "slow and steady" approach. It will not serve her well, but it is understandable.

Re:Good reason for working local....

[cheesybagel]

That clearly explains the success of Linux kernel development with its centralized location and excellent eye to eye developer contract vias a vias the Microsoft NT kernel development team. Nope. Actually it doesn't.

Re:Good reason for working local....

[tlambert]

That clearly explains the success of Linux kernel development with its centralized location and excellent eye to eye developer contract vias a vias the Microsoft NT kernel development team. Nope. Actually it doesn't.

It took me dragging 5 people in to get a time code change into the event system in Linux. Linux is to the point where it doesn't do anything revolutionary any more. I ended up writing a specific driver to deal with a generic USB issue in order to get the thing into the kernel. All the USB firmware for keyboards is ripped off from all the other firmware, so the cheap keyboards are all doing encoding of shift keys in band instead of using the 8 bits out of band. But I fixed exactly one because trying to fix them all got shot down. On the plus side, it works with Chromebooks and Android phones, so guess what? I don't care any more.

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

It can.

A Comeback? Possibly.

[Ralph Spoilsport]

It all depends on how fast Facebook collapses.

Don't call it a comeback!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been here for years

Mama said knock you out

Ladies Love

Well, Yahoogroups is sort of useful

[RubberDogBone]

Seems doubtful to me. Yahoogroups is the only thing I use made by Yahoo, and they don't really "make" it as such. The content is all from other users. Yahoo hasn't done a good job monetizing it either. They happily send me a digest every so often which has no branding or ads or anything.

Clearly some sort of brilliant minimalist marketing strategy I don't comprehend.

My ISP converted all their email accounts over to Yahoo, but I don't exactly use Yahoo for that either. I have Gmail POP it. From my perspective, it's a Gmail account. And after that, it's an account with my ISP, not Yahoo.

For the others, well, never used Flickr. Once or twice used Yahoo auctions. Do they even still have them? Yahoo Japan auctions are good but that's not really the same company. Never used Tumblr. Had to stop and think, who was it again Yahoo bought. It's so irrelevant I paid it almost no attention.

Marissa Mayer DOES bother me, though. My boss has started emulating certain aspects of Ms. Mayer's work habits and compelling myself and fellow employees to follow along. That's great if you actually are a Marissa Mayer with huge responsibilities and commensurate compensation. But when you are a low-level mid-five-figure team lead for a software company which actively hates its customers and employees, these superboss work habits amount to jack shit. They don't fix anything at our level and they don't matter to anyone above you either, much less the executive team. Riding the team under you as if you are a Mayer when you are not is like watching whatshisname do his funky cowboy hop. It's not a real cowboy. My boss is not a real Marissa Mayer.

You know who should stage a comeback?

[dccase]

Slashdot should stage a comeback.

Re:You know who should stage a comeback?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot should stage a comeback.

I'm totally with you on this. I think Slashdot could do it by getting rid of 90% of the complexity and focus on making the site just work again. I am sick of the long lags just in typing in an input field and sick of the lockups and the "stop script" dialog. The Full/Abbreviated/Hidden slider no longer works for me either. More and more of Slashdot has been breaking as time goes on, and I think that has something to do with the rarity of comments going over a thousand and how one never hears the term "slashdot effect" anymore.

Re:You know who should stage a comeback?

[Yosho]

Switch back to the classic discussion system. It still works just fine.

Re:You know who should stage a comeback?

[Anonymous Coward]

All we'd need to do is get rid of all the new bling that breaks half its functionality, and somehow get rid of all the uneducated moron high school dropouts that can't tell a there from a they're or a too from a to. If dropouts want to lurk, fine, but if they haven't ever read a book that their teacher didn't force them to*, they have no business posting alongside PhDs. These dufuses should at least get an Associate degree; there are few instances when the uneducated can educate the educated. Half the reason I come here is because sometimes it's a learning experience. As your UID shows you've been here about ten years I doubt you'll disagree; that was before people thought buying gizmos made them nerds. You're a nerd if you research the science that makes these gizmos possible, design these gizmos, program these gizmos, or hack... sorry, the normals changed that word... repurpose these gizmos.

That's actually the worst annoyance I have with slashdot, they usually get the bugs fixed sooner or later. I'm pissed off that all the damned normals come here and post aliterate drivel that gets modded to +5 when they should be modded down to oblivion. I wish they'd bring back the old metamoderation system, that actually worked. Befire a few years ago most comments were at least literate.

* tl;dr is internet slang for "I am an aliterate bibliophobe."

The future for Yahoo....

[King_TJ]

One of my friends started his own venture capital business years ago, after a long career in corporate I.T. (He focuses on funding educational related projects.)

We were talking a bit about the recent changes at Yahoo, and I know his opinion is that the Tumblr purchase is ill-advised. and looks like it cost the company pretty much all of the available capital it had to spend. After that, I don't think Yahoo is in a financial position to do much more in the way of acquiring anything else. They've got to make do with revamping what they already own (and maybe they think talent obtained from Tumbler will help towards that end?).

The thing is, Yahoo spent FAR too long concerning themselves with convincing people their "branding" was still relevant, and thought they could somehow "win" simply by reminding folks to consider them for search queries. (Remember all the annoying "Yaaaaahhhhhoooooooo!" ads on TV?)

Now, even if the current CEO is trying to make serious changes, I think it's going to be too little, too late. Figuring out a way to monetize Tumblr is a full-time job in itself -- and one you MIGHT want to take on if you were an otherwise profitable and successful company. But Yahoo seems like they just bought themselves a big database of porn and pet pictures that has a relatively short shelf-life, before it's not "trendy" to use anymore and the user-base moves on to something else.

Flickr really was a significantly good service they owned. I knew quite a few photographers who religiously uploaded their work to Flickr (typically with a Pro account since they wanted more storage space and ability to put full resolution photos up). But as they let it stagnate, all sorts of other "Johnny come lately" photo sharing services popped up -- many integrated real tightly with mobile phones, which have become the #1 device used to take photos in the first place.

The press-conference "slam" against pro photographers tells me Yahoo still thinks it needs to cater to the mainstream -- exactly the group they'll have the most competition with. Bad move. If they really enhanced a paid, "Pro" side of the service and kept it cheaper than alternatives -- I know a LOT of people who have at least a second job dealing in photography who'd sign up and use it.

Email is a non-starter at this point. Lots of us still have yahoo email accounts, but it's very often just because of old partnerships they struck with ISPs like the regional Bell telephone companies and later AT&T. You ordered your DSL service? You got a Yahoo email with it. Yahoo Groups had a good run but again, they let it pretty much die off. I used to use it occasionally until the groups all seemed to fill rapidly with spam, and upload/download speeds on attachments got so pitifully slow, you wondered if the whole thing ran on an old Pentium 3 in someone's basement. They only get search queries, by and large, because they manage to work deals to keep it a "default" search engine in various programs. None of their stuff really stands out as a tool you want to use that you can't get elsewhere.

Re:The future for Yahoo....

[slashdot_commentator]

Marissa Meyer's tumblr purchase strategy isn't nuts, just the price ($1.1 billion?!?!)

Meyer wants to improve Yahoo's current products, and move Yahoo to a focused social media/portal platform. She's counting on Yahoo grabbing a piece of the mobile social media pie, which no big player has right now. (Google would be closest.) This is what will fuel Yahoo's "comeback" into relevance. The problem is that Yahoo has zero product presence in mobile. She's buying tumblr as an infrastructure purchase.

The next issue is pretty cool. Turns out, Facebook will probably not grow anymore. The tweens don't like Facebook. Kids don't like to treat their social media as maintenance work. And Facebook's zeal to grab eyeballs means parents have moved to Facebook, which makes it uncool. Kids want to maintain communication with their peers, so they're gravitating towards low maintenance social media, like twitter, tumblr, and instagram (which Facebook is borging to death). So Meyer buys tumblr to get more presence in social media, and deny another avenue Facebook can acquire to fix their mobile/tween growth. The problem is there's no way tumblr is worth $1.1 billion, unless Meyer is grabbing brains as well, and sees some sort of general social media on mobile framework she can build Yahoo on top of tumblr.

Re:The future for Yahoo....

[coofercat]

I'm ex-Yahoo, and I know first hand how utterly rotten the culture was when I left. I once was on a mission to decom a handful of crappy servers running some really crappy code. They were once, in the mists of time, used to perform some tracking on a particular campaign, and were the brain-child of an idiot architect. They cost money to run, so I tried to find who consumed the information they produced. I checked around, and actually found people very helpful - it turns out, no one was using the data, so I could literally have just switched off the servers and no one would care. BUT they were still serving tracking pixels on a number of sites. I then log tickets with all of the properties I could identify asking them to remove the pixels from their pages - "it'll make your page load faster, and it'll mean we can switch these servers off, so save the company some money" (ie. "come on guys, this is a good thing"). I'd say I got about 30% traction - that is, about 30% of the properties involved actually went and did it in the following 6 months. The others just ignored me, and so I suspect those servers are still humming away today - thousands of dollars and a few years later.

So anyway... the point is, there's a long way to travel. There's a huge amount of cultural change required to even make small changes to any of the hundreds of Yahoo properties. From what I hear, Marissa is challenging the property owners to make a big change in 3-6 months - some will make it, some with hack their properties to shreds to make it and some will fail. From there, I guess she knows what she's up against.

I for one do hope they make it. Despite everything, an Internet entirely without Yahoo leaves things a bit too open for the likes of Google and Facebook. Yahoo's got the scale, and they still have a massive, massive user-base. Hopefully they can turn that to their advantage and be a credible player on the Internet. I'm sure people will say "yeah, but Facebook is better" or "Google search is better" or whatever, but that's not the point. Yahoo just needs a few niches that are the best there is (which Flickr could be, if they keep going).

Actually, on Flickr - the mobile App is actually pretty good. I can't admit to using it all that much because I'm a photo-luddite, but the app is quite nice. That's not to say it's perfect, but it's going in the right direction.

Re:The future for Yahoo....

[Anonymous Coward]

>. But Yahoo seems like they just bought themselves a big database of porn and pet pictures

I never really figured out how to get to the porn on Tumblr. :(

Edit: Captcha = "Furrier"

It's been coming...

[rabidlemur]

Flickr's reboot came with the new iPhone app, which was completely unexpected in that, it 's actually damn good. Same with Yahoo weather. Yes, Flickr has decided that they're not courting Pro customers. They'd already lost that market 2 years ago, so it's no skin off their nose. They don't WANT you to buy pro, they need the ad revenue and impressions far more.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

When they bought MUSICMATCH

[Anonymous Coward]

And MUSICMATCH became Yahoomusic my "lifetime subscription" for $19.95 became useless.
Basically it was a music selling site and the MP3 ripper I paid for didn't work anymore without an "upgrade"
So I bought into Winamp For $20 and AOL bought them and turned it into a dinosaur.
Justin Franks created winamp about the time of MP3 ripping and it was tops with the visuals trumping everything else.
Because a lot of the programming was done by creative souls (not mindless revenue collectors.)
Anyway Yahoogroups was over ran with HTML exploits and took forever to get them to fix it.
By then it was too late for me. Still use their freee mail and regardless get 1 or 2 emails and 26 or 30 spams a day etc.
I would think they could get rid of that over advertised BING pc of s""t and pull it out of the gutter yet.
The ads have to quit, extra page walkthroughs have to quit. The exploits HAVE to quit.
Stop making it so easy for the Russians etc to ruin our internet Yahoo.

Re:When they bought MUSICMATCH

[unixisc]

They also did a fine job destroying Geocities

They made $3.9 billion last year

[Anonymous Coward]

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=YHOO+Income+Statement&annual

so... yeah.

Sure Yahoo! could stage a comeback, the same way

[aussersterne]

Apple did.

Make cool stuff that people want to use. It's not rocket science, it's just that there's so much dead weight in most companies living inside the company bubble with wrongheaded ideas about what the public wants and overvalued MBA degrees that it's rare.

A bit of hard data, a bit of freedom for forward-thinking designers and developers, including the realization that they need to be aggressive, not conservative, update/relaunch products at 2013 speeds (as opposed to 1994 speeds), and embrace things like the mobile ecosystem and social media, a bit of marketing, and Yahoo! could be at the top of the game again.

I have nothing against Yahoo!, just against shitty, decade-outdated products, which is what they've been making/maintaining for some time. Fix the products, make cool stuff, and I'll be happy to use it.

At least one thing is unique - Flickr

[SuperKendall]

What makes a product or service from Yahoo unique?

Flickr for one is now unique. It was not before. But the new all-out focus on always seeing the largest image possible is quite different than any other photo sharing site. All of the others, even 500px, drill down into a single image view with a small image, Yahoo displays as much as possible in the window it is given.

with pron

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. But only if their CEO begins flashing her breasts.

Does Yahoo sell e-mail content to spammers?

[shadowofwind]

A few weeks ago I e-mailed my wife's yahoo account, from my Google account, to ask her if a house we're buying has an alarm system. A few hours later I received an e-mailed advertisement from ADT in my Yahoo spam folder. How does this happen? Its not this one incident, my Yahoo spam generally tracks with what I've been e-mailing people about.

The answer to this question aside, I find Yahoo to be increasingly sleazy and malware-like. I hope that Yahoo can't make a comeback without cleaning up their act.

Re:Does Yahoo sell e-mail content to spammers?

[Anonymous Coward]

An elderly, not too bright friend wanted me to help him install Firefox. He had Yahoo as his home page and search engine so rather than the extra clicks and typing to get to Google, I used Yahoo's search. When I installed Firefox, it had a Yahoo toolbar preinstalled. That was sleazy as hell, how is a stealth install NOT malware?

Adobe Flash did the same thing on my work computer when I did a security update, installing a Google toolbar om IE. I'm thinking all the big companies are run by sociopaths who all belong in prison.

Look closer

[Anonymous Coward]

He signed it there at the end.

CmdTaco has left /.

[Anonymous Coward]

... and that happened quite some time ago

Should have taken Microsoft's bid years ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

No doubt about it.

RIP Yahoo you where great while you lasted. Thanks for all the R&D you put into open source.

Of course they "could"

[ron_ivi]

Yahoo *could* stage a comeback

Indeed.

Broadcast.com (that Yahoo payed $5billion for) was the premier video site and *could* take over Netflix +Youtube.

Geocities (that Yahoo paid $3-4billion for) was the premier social networking site, and *could* take over MySpace and Facebook.

Altavista (that Yahoo bought along with Overture) was the premier search inge, and *could* take over Bing and Google.

But it's Yahoo, so they won't.

The Shoe Lady shops again

[Anonymous Coward]

She doesn't seem good at much besides shopping (for shoes) and pissing employees off. A lame company with a lame bimbo in charge. Good luck there, Muffy!

ssh

[SgtChaireBourne]

If SSH is working properly you don't need a VPN. In fact if your service is so insecure that it needs a VPN then it probably shouldn't be connected to the net in the first place. Same goes for Git, SVN and other versioning. I can think of dozens of work activities that would never need to use a VPN. The whole premise of low VPN usage smacks of MBA-driven ignorance and Windows quirks.

Re:ssh

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole premise of low VPN usage smacks of MBA-driven ignorance and Windows quirks.

No, some of us live in this thing called 'reality'. VPN is massively used everywhere for roadwarriors because not every damn application is some cloud drive piece of HTTPS shit.

Re:ssh

[freezin fat guy]

The whole premise of low VPN usage smacks of MBA-driven ignorance and Windows quirks.

No, some of us live in this thing called 'reality'. VPN is massively used everywhere for roadwarriors because not every damn application is some cloud drive piece of HTTPS shit.

Actually SSH is used partly for the same reason. To clarify the grandparent's point the, uh, 'reality' is that SSH is not the same thing as HTTPS, and it does not restrict one to working via web browser.

Anyway, it seems unlikely that the login numbers were skewed by the majority of workers finding SSH more convenient and nobody telling brass.

My guess is that VPN is massively used because the majority of people, including IT, are still working within the Windowsphere.

It can maybe if it ditches the name

[execthis]

Hello?!? Yahoo is a stupid name for a website.

They have to

[thetoadwarrior]

Google has become a cancer that needs fighting. Someone needs to given a serious challenge.

Re:They have to

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod this up. Google has become a fucking death star.

It could seriously destroy the whole fucking species.

I'm still mad about ...

[TheRealBlueEAGLE]

... the way they bought The All-Seeing Eye (Yes, I am that old) and then put it to the sword. I never even got the refund for my life time license.

There are many more differences between them

[brunes69]

For starters, people actually use and like Google's products. Everyone uses Google search - everyone. There is a reason "to Google" is a verb people use in daily life and "to Bing" is not unless it is being forced down someone's throat by product placement. People use GMail en masse, again because they like it, not because people are telling them to or because it came with their ISP. People actively MOVE to GMail and make new accounts. Who uses Yahoo mail besides people trying to keep a decade-old email address alive - who are they new people flocking to it? Who are the people flocking to Yahoo search?

The one last bastion of Yahoo that Google has not yet conquered is Finance. Google Finance is nice, but Yahoo Finance is still better and much more complete. If I were Yahoo I would be putting a lot more focus into it's finance product... focus on what works. They should just get out of the email and social space totally.

Re:There are many more differences between them

[ferret4]

People actually use Yahoo!s products too, otherwise they wouldn't have made $5 billion profit last year, the year before, and the year before that. It's vocal tech communities and business columnists that have their heads in the sand, not Yahoo! or it's users.

Re:There are many more differences between them

[brunes69]

It is not the tech community, it is the business community.

5 Billion in profit may sound like a lot to you and me, but to a company with 11,000 employees it is chump change. There is a reason Yahoo only has a 7x P/E and a $27 stock price... the outlook is horrible. Yahoo's annual revenue has DECLINED every year since 2009. Compare to Google who has doubled there revenue since 2009, and grown it roughly 50% the past two years. Compare to Google, who makes 10x the revenue yahoo does with only 5x the headcount. It is a much more efficient money making machine than Yahoo.

If Yahoo doesn't stop the bleeding soon then the well will run dry. A company that makes no money can't carry 11,000 employees.

Re:There are many more differences between them

[DerekLyons]

For starters, people actually use and like Google's products

And people actually use and like Yahoo's products too.

As to the rest of your comment - your ignorance is only not stunning because it's (unfortunately) not uncommon. There's more to the world than search. And yes, I see new Yahoo mail accounts regularly.
 

The one last bastion of Yahoo that Google has not yet conquered is Finance

Finance, and picture sharing (Flickr), and personalized homepages (My Yahoo), and Groups (Yahoo Groups) and... you really have utterly no clue what you're talking about. Get out of your Google fanboy bubble.

Re:There are many more differences between them

[brunes69]

Google+ Photos (aka Picasa) has 343 million active users. Flickr has 87million. I think Google has photo sharing figured out.

Google groups also dwarfs Yahoo groups. Not only do they have 30 years of back data but the sheer number of available groups is about 100x. I don't even know how you can compare Yahoo to Google in this respect, it is kind of nonsensical.

iGoogle is being retired because no one uses it. Just liek no one uses My Yahoo. Personalized home pages is about 10 years ago.

Geocities

[Anonymous Coward]

BRING BACK GEOCITIES.

Other People's Code = integration nightmare

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo is trying to play catchup for a decade or so of languishing. They want to combined Facebook and Google in one end-to-end social platform that will have advertisers lining up with dumptrucks of money because Yahoo will out-do any existing competitor by supporting more platforms better. (Now I could be wrong, and Mayer may just be making stuff up, but this is what I see as their strategy.)

They can't possibly write all this code themselves quickly, so they are buying companies to get their code. A mobile feed program here, a social pin-up company there, and pretty soon you see where Yahoo wants to go. They want all the pieces that Google and Facebook already have, plus move out into mobile platforms before Facebook figures them out. (Facebook Home for Android has to be the best gift Yahoo ever got - an extra year lead time while Facebook screws up Android.)

Now the trick is that they have to integrate all this code. Anyone who has ever had to use Other People's Code will know that this is not going to be easy.

I think Yahoo is trying a desperation play. It's all they can do to survive. If they can integrate Other People's Code into one unified platform, they can pull it of. If not, it will be a disaster.

Either way, Mayer will get her millions. She's the new Carly Fiorina. Doesn't matter if Yahoo succeeds or fails, Mayer is a business person looking out for #1 and getting her millions before the ship sinks.

hmmm. why did I automatically ...

[Anonymous Coward]

visit finance.yahoo.com

the last time the doom meter was counting down and I cared, it was Blackberry. It was at under 10 bucks. As the analysts were ringing in the demise, I suggested to look for a recovery, but to 12 sell at 24-32. I was looking at charts from yahoo (at least hosted there). I'd bet on yahoo having some life left in it, although I can't evaluate it.

In any case, I always go back to finance.yahoo.com which I've been using since, what, 2001?!!!!!

Comeback?

[Anonymous Coward]

From what to what? Yahoo doesn't really seem to make or do anything.

Big opportunity...

[erp_consultant]

Despite all their floundering, Yahoo still has tons of page views every day. A lot of people still use Yahoo as their primary email. The trick is how to turn it into revenue. Are they going to follow everyone else with the "give it for free, make it up on advertising" model or come up with something more innovative? Personally I think a lot of people are very wary of this model, me included. You end up giving away all your personal details (hello Google and Facebook) in exchange for a so called "free" application. Maybe the time has come to buy back your anonymity. I would be willing to pay for such a service, provided that I had an iron clad legally enforceable agreement with the vendor that my personal information would never be sold to a third party.

On "Can Yahoo Actually Stage a Comeback?"

[NikeHerc]

The short answer: who cares?

The long answer, after considering the new CEO zapped all her remote workers: who cares?

Yahoo needs brand equity

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo needs to identify itself. Apple stands for Design and Quality, Google for search,mail and innovation, Facebook for socializing and Twitter is the news and views in a instant.
Yahoo is neither search nor email. I stopped used Yahoo when they stopped allowing search more than a year in free email.The only reason I had Yahoo was for old mails and once this was lost no point in continuing.
Still Yahoo has a fairly safe email account for under-13s which google doesnt have.
Right now there is a identity crisis on what makes Yahoo unique and if the current CEO can create the identity then this company is saved like Apple.iMac gave Apple its identity, Yahoo needs something similar.
They have already lost the mobile wave!

Yes, it can

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an enormous amount of hate and fear of Google and Microsoft.
With Yahoo, I only attributed their bungling stupidity to making my email account be hacked (just stupidity, no malice).

I don't know about you, but if I could, I would leave the duoply of the MS/Google online stazi environment as soon as I could.
If Yahoo presented as a viable* email alternative, I would switch.
Taking a page from Apple, I've already switched my search engines over to Yahoo.

*Private and secure -- that is, unhackable, with SSL as default, and no phone number or other P.I.I. bs needed.