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Yahoo Closes Lab, Among Other Things (venturebeat.com)
mikejuk writes: In its recent earnings call, Yahoo revealed plans to cut its workforce by 15% -- around 1,600 employees by the end of the year. Yahoo Labs is another victim of the cuts as revealed in a Tumblr post by Yoelle Maarek who reports that both Yahoo's Chief Scientist, Ron Brachman, and VP of Research Ricardo Baeza-Yates, will be leaving the company and that going forward: "Our new approach is to integrate research teams directly into our product teams in order to produce innovation that will drive excellence in those product areas. We will also have an independent research team that will work autonomously or in partnership with product partners. The integrated and independent teams, as a whole, will be known as Yahoo Research." Maarek, formerly VP of Research now becomes leader of Yahoo Research. To anyone who has followed the story of research at Yahoo there will be a sense of deja vu. Back in 2012 Yahoo laid off many of its research team, many of whom found a new home with Microsoft. It was Marissa Meyer who in the following year recruited a substantial number of PhDs to Yahoo Labs which initiated some interesting projects.
Meyer clearly thought research would save Yahoo, but now it all seems a bit late and Yahoo can't save its research lab.
Meyer clearly thought research would save Yahoo, but now it all seems a bit late and Yahoo can't save its research lab.
I thought there was a big call for Meyer's head on a plate a while back. Did that just disappear in to the woodwork? It does seem like a lot of the companies' failure can be traced directly back to faulty leadership.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
ruined by bringing in too many PhDs.... Matrox.
Mostly random stuff.
I thought it was just for the ramblings of 17 year old girls? Or is that LiveJournal?
Yahoo's death knell for me was when del.icio.us no longer worked for me on a normal web browser, barely a couple weeks after yahoo bought it out. Even now, after a few years, the only way it works is if I put a browser in "private" mode. Which um, feels weird. That said, if there's anything I wish would work out for yahoo, it's Other Space - which, they put zero effort into making that available on my TV. Why do I need to plug my laptop into my AVR to watch a freaking show? Or trick yahoo into thinking my AVR browser is acceptable. Why pretend you're making TV content but not put effort into making it available on TVs? Yeah, horrible leadership.
A tax consultant probably persuaded Yahoo that a R&D center would make a great tax write off, and, who knows, it might develop a product that could save the company from itself.
Productize=make things useful enough to actually being used. Example: Linux vs. Hurd.
Our new approach is to integrate research teams directly into our product teams in order to produce innovation that will drive excellence in those product areas
This sentence makes me throw up inside.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Do you know what the "D" in "R&D" means?
I mean, not just which word it is, but what is actually meant by that word?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Why doesn't Meyer just close the company down. She can be the last one out so she can shut off the lights.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Because you can have useful things that isn't a product. Productize is a cromulent word.
D=Development. Guess what? I am talking about Research divisions. They are called "Yahoo Research" not "Yahoo R&D". THey are all "R" and no "D". Dumb.
Can anyone state a reason why Yahoo still exists? Do they do anything at all that isn't done better by someone else?
They should have gone bust back around 2003. They're certainly on the road to bankruptcy; it's just taking a painfully long time.
If Meyer's idea of trying to move Yahoo! forward is the hiring of PhDs, that explains much about the horrid redesign of their web site.
Only someone devoid of reality or common sense could think that crappy look and layout would make people want to stay.
As I said previously, with any luck the web designers and those who approved the new design are included as part of the force reduction. If anyone deserves to be fired, they most certainly do.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Research divisions are useless anyway.
IBM Research: ATM, floppy disk, Winchester disk, scanning tunneling microscope, magnetic stripe card, relational database, UPC, FORTRAN, SABRE, DRAM, FFT, DES, Fractals, RISC, etc.
Yeah, no kidding, until about the last 50 years, private research divisions were driving all the progress. Until some bright accountant figured it was cheaper to let universities do the R&D at the student's expense, then you just buy the IP without all the messy HR stuff, and you have an infinite supply of eager, naive, pre-broke employees.
Research divisions are useless anyway.
Do you not see the irony? The website you mentioned this runs entirely off unix clones. Where do you think unix came from? Magical fairy land?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Two reasons. One, they have a $32bn equity stake in Alibaba, which is hugely successful.
And two, they still have a billion active users on their portal sites (Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, etc), which is why they were trying to rebrand as a "media company".
At its nadir Apple looked ready to go bankrupt because it didn't do anything that wasn't done better by someone else. Yahoo has smart people and money to invest in new services and products. Yahoo could still pull off the business equivalent of a moon shot.
What does Yahoo actually do now? Are they a holding company for other companies? Do they provide any services? WTF Yahoo.
You want to make a cool company? Build a public utility cloud. Offer free service to non-profits to generate buzz. Give away Internet access capped at 10 mb/s and charge a nominal fee for more. DO SOMETHING BOLD, don't just try to re-tread old ideas.
Cheers,
Andrew
Because 90% of the company woes lie in their laps with their stupid decisions and their incompetence.
Why is it they lay off everyone else yet keep the dead weight that actually destroys the company employed?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
They should have gone bust back around 2003. They're certainly on the road to bankruptcy; it's just taking a painfully long time.
Oy, I know. They're like the SCO of the not-suing-linux world.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Most of Yahoo's problems can be traced back to those male CEOs. Marissa has not fixed the problems, but she didn't cause them either.
While it was pretty stupid of the GP to blame Yahoo's current predicament on Marissa's ovaries, it's just as stupid to blame them on "the previous administration". Yahoo has some serious directional problems, and a lot of that has to do with board members selected by activist investors tugging them in all sorts of stupid directions, looking for a short tem up-tick in the stock price so they can sell out, and get their 12-15% ROI.
Firing these researchers is also a good step. Yahoo needs to focus on fixing their core products, not pie-in-the-sky long horizon research.
Actually, it was a pretty bad idea.
The absolutely most "pie-in-the-sky" thing that any researcher could be working on in the field of CS today is probably "how do we keep Yahoo from tanking completely".
[ ... list of personal hobby-horse bugs ...] So what are these 15,000 employees doing all day, if none of them can be spared to fix a serious bug in a core product?
Mostly, they are handling Yahoo's small business web hosting business. Which is surprisingly huge, considering they outsource their domain registration to Melbourne IT, which is well known for being incredibly hard to pry domains away from (they believe they own your domain, rather than you owning your domain), and a Manilla call center doesn't really help.
If you get your domain with someone else (GoDaddy, etc.), then Yahoo's offerings for small business are relatively sane. I expect most of their day is spent doing administration and support.
Why is there no unit/regression testing to keep bugs like this from being deployed?
Regression testing generally does not do dick. It should be in your toolbox, but you'd probably be best advised to keep it under your allen wrenches, rather than keeping it on top of other more useful tools. The problem with regression testing is that it tests for problems you've already fixed to make sure that they do not come back. If you've spent a week tracking down a problem: trust me, you are unlikely to reintroduce the thing, even accidentally. It's a reactive testing methodology.
Unit testing is more useful, but not the best testing one can do. You can know that the units you are testing work in the way that you intended, but in terms of the overall scheme of things, there's "this unit works in isolation", and then there's "this unit plays well with others". Working in isolation is pretty meaningless, if using it is still impossible because of interface impedance mismatches.
Best is functional testing. This requires a lot of infrastructure, starting with design documents, and a lot of test infrastructure which is used to verify the design, and then verify the design as deployed. It's a lot of work. It's worthwhile work. Almost zero web companies do it, because "web sites are for churning": you fully expect to rewrite everything from scratch next week, and everyone involved knows for a fact that they are not building anything of lasting value to humanity, because the code they write will likely not survive next month's rewrite anyway.
Which comes down to the fact that no one builds cathedrals any more, because everyone is convinced that you can iterate to success, and being able to do that faster than anyone else is more important than building foundations on which you can successfully build walls, walls on which you can place trusses, trusses that you can place roofs on, or roofs that you can tile/shingle so they don't leak, etc..
So usually good organizations do unit testing, bad organizations do regressions testing, terrible organizations do "deployment testing".
And yeah, researchers are pretty good at building cathedrals, if they are allowed to draw up plans, and then follow those p
Well, beside Alibaba stock they handle email for a few paying customers, for example Rogers corporation outsources email handling to them.
You can't handle the truth.
Yeah, Yahoo! Finance is still the best free financial data provider. They still have better charts than Google, and they had those charts before Google even had a finance page.
Also, Yahoo Messenger is used by people who don't use facebook to stay in touch with people they added to their IM in the late 90s...
I'm still using ICQ for that, though.
I'm normally a big fan of R&D, but if a company is spending a lot of money on R&D and their R hasn't produced a product in decades and their D can't fix known bugs in core products, then getting rid of them is a great idea. They need R&D for their future, they do. And they won't have any until they've purged whoever was pocketing the money intended for R&D. In a few years, they can rebuild the department. In the meantime, D is getting folded into product teams, where it already should have been.
No, they were all R and no D. They're still called R, but they're inside product teams now. That means now they are all D and no R.
For the record... Productize is a word. It's not just a word, spell check knows it is a word. It even has a meaning. However, I am pretty sure you're not actually supposed to use that word.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Email, Finance, and Tumblr I figure
Do they do anything at all that isn't done better by someone else?
Spread Malware and Scams using Trojan Ad's comes to mind. There's very few companies that do a better job and have the reach than Yahoo does when it comes to this.
The Shareholders are probably wishing they took the Ballmer deal when Microsoft offered them stupid amounts of money for Yahoo.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
integrate research teams directly into our product teams in order to produce innovation that will drive excellence
?
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Their weather app for the iPhone is pretty nice. I don't like the layout for the iPad though.
Yahoo has some pretty decent products like Finance, which are almost invisible. I'm sure lots of people type a ticker into a search engine, end up on Yahoo Finance, only vaguely aware that they're actually using Yahoo. I'm surprised Yahoo doesn't pay more attention to stuff like that, though perhaps with the way they've screwed up the things they do tinker around with, maybe it's best that they continue to ignore things like Yahoo Finance.
[Marissa] took some positive steps, like ending the one day per week of "working from home" that most Yahoos referred to as their "day off". My neighbor works for Yahoo, and it is nice that he no longer starts his lawnmower at 9am every Friday.
Ah yes, good that the slacker neighbor is forced back to work. Probably deserves a good whipping halfway though the day to keep him on track... Hey, wait! What are you doing around the house at 9AM on a Friday to hear his lawnmower start up? Shouldn't you be at work?
We already know - take a look at Compaq & HP.
If there's enough of them left that you can actually find them.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Tumblr not Tumbler!
That's pretty impressive. I was still in high school & moonlighting in a bar at that age.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This is the problem : invention, in the software space consists of all three of a) a clever idea b) implemented and used by the market c) purchased by the market so it makes, or supports making profit (or an exit). It's really hard to know where a) is going to come from, hard to get b) to happen, and c) depends on so many factors unrelated to a) and b) sales, macro market issues. Especially as there's no formula for creating good ideas, unlike there are formulas for b) (e.g agile) and c) P&L, it's 'understandable' that business owners (Ms. Mayer) looks at the contributions of a), over time, and sees expense, and nothing brought to the company. I speak from experience, having mananaged a 'fully funded by DARPA' team which was part of a public company. Because DARPA set the 'academic ish' problem criteria, and few of a) were transferred, and the research group didn't make *profit* the research team was sold off. Funding labs takes both high level sponsorship at a company as well as a company that takes the long view, AND has revenue to support. You all know who those are. Many many decades ago, that was Bell Labs. Now it's Google etc. This cut is isn't unexpected, and I'm surprised it took Ms. Mayer this long.
Wondering already what happens with the Mozilla search engine contract. In the worst case Mozilla would end without main income source. Interesting times!
Can anyone state a reason why Yahoo still exists? Do they do anything at all that isn't done better by someone else?
They should have gone bust back around 2003. They're certainly on the road to bankruptcy; it's just taking a painfully long time.
I like their email product. I have used other web services, but I like the KISS approach, and it works for me.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
If they really want to be taken as a serious company, maybe they should first focus on making their website look like a trustworthy, professional search engine instead of a sketchy tabloid-like website with a search function built into it.
I thought it was just for the ramblings of 17 year old girls? Or is that LiveJournal?
Wow, and I was afraid I was out of touch. All those 17 year old girls on Tumblr are now in their twenties and thirties, but most have moved to Pinterest. LJ is pretty much all Russian bloggers.
But Tumblr is only 9 years old -- they can't be 30 yet!
But Tumblr is only 9 years old -- they can't be 30 yet!
Well, all the users weren't 17. I do have a friend that has a blog that caters to teenage girls and young women and she keeps track of what they use and how. It's been a while since I've had the current situation explained to me, but many of the users I see on tumbr are quite older than 17 these days and the young crowd tends to find their own methods that differ from the previous generation. I think things have all moved to mobile sharing apps for some time.