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."
Yes, it is. It's a horrible Metroised mess of pictures that trades function for shiny.
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.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Facebook can't even be the next Facebook, these days.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
She is hot, though.
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Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
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.
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.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
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.
End of Line.
It all depends on how fast Facebook collapses.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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...
Bye!
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.
Bye!
No, it is objectively worse than it used to be.
It is even worse than Unity, though I think Windows 8 beats them both.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
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).
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.