Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
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.
Ya, but this isn't really a headline... it's an Ask Slashdot question.
is a complete and utter disaster.
They really really have to get their own search engine going again.
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.
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.
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!
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
TLDR: no.
Longer answer: No.
Why?
Leadership. There is none.
So... no.
--
BMO
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric_question
That is already quite the turn around.
More relevant: Can slashdot stage a comeback?
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.
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?
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
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
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..
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.
Can it grow? Sure. Can it grow significantly? Sure! Can it be the next Facebook/Google? Maybe.. doubtful.
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
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.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
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.
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This means they can FINALLY drop that stupid fucking question mark! :D
"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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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
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?!
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The new and improved Yarrrrhoo! can embrace a new synergy of proactive distributed cloud sharing. 'Rissa Dot Com, CEO for a new era.
I looked recently and IIRC their stock is about back to where it was five years ago.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
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.
Visit the
...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.
Oh herp derp. That's for OTHER companies.
So then who maintains slashdot code? CmdTaco? samzenpus?
Can someone explain the difference between Flickr & Tumblr? To a jaded old fool like me they sound pretty much the same.
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.
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
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.
Are you actually trying to make a point somewhere?
"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!
...and nothing of value was lost.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
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....
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.
It all depends on how fast Facebook collapses.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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.
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).
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.
Sig for hire.
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.
Slashdot should stage a comeback.
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.
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 based on user account deletion
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.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
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.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
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.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
He signed it there at the end.
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.
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.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
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?
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Hello?!? Yahoo is a stupid name for a website.
Google has become a cancer that needs fighting. Someone needs to given a serious challenge.
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...
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.
... 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.
If pro and con are opposites, what is the opposite of progress?
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.
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.
Dating? Yea, I think the kids still do that. Not sure though.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
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.
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.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
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.
Errrmmm ... Geocities?
OK, I doubt it too.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
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.
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.
The short answer: who cares?
The long answer, after considering the new CEO zapped all her remote workers: who cares?
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
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
They also did a fine job destroying Geocities
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.
Back in 1996 there wasn't Altavista but there were other search engines like Lycos (crap) and Hotbot (actually quite good).