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Yahoo started as a couple of people who said "This internet thing has a lot of content now, let's try to organize it for people." They should go back to doing t
by hooande 11y ago
Yahoo started as a couple of people who said "This internet thing has a lot of content now, let's try to organize it for people." They should go back to doing that, and throw 20 years worth of technology and cultural growth at the problem. Along with as much manpower and machine learning tech as hundreds of millions of dollars can buy.
I do enjoy the drama of the Mayer Saga, but it doesn't seem like any of Yahoo's attempts at innovation are working. They shouldn't be competing with Google in search. They should be redefining search. Some times the best way to change the game is to go back to basics. Of course if I knew exactly what that looked like, I would be too busy walking the path to wealth to write hn comments. But it does seem like Yahoo isn't doing anything innovative right now. Their most valuable properties, mail and the yahoo home page, are simply good enough versions of products that have become commodities. They began by offering a service that no one else was providing, and have ended up being relegated to being the internet's generic alternative to everything.
It's Hail Mary time. If I were in Mayer's position, I would find a way to burn a few hundred million dollars of the alibaba money on a moon shot before the board had time to vote me out. The odds against may be overwhelming, but it's better than slightly slowing the angular velocity of their circle around the drain. With the recent tone of press articles about her tenure and what that does to an executive's reputation, I don't see what she has to lose.
- chimeracoder 11y ago> They shouldn't be competing with Google in search. They should be redefining search. Yahoo is hardly trying to compete with Google in search; they have literally been outsourcing search to Bing for several years now. The problem is that they're trying to figure out what they should be doing instead, and struggling.
- tayo42 11y ago>But it does seem like Yahoo isn't doing anything innovative right now. Aren't they starting to stream nfl games for free? The first one they did was from what I heard handled very well. I thought there was talks about more.
- TheCondor 11y agoWith their brand equity, is it possible for them to innovate? It isnt hip enough to be cool, it's not big enough to be Facebook or google, it's a $30billion company that some how has the branding of the internets AOL. If yahoo "innovates" it will immediately be uncool. Morale issues definitely can make things more difficult but are things really that dire there? Best thing I can see they've got going for them is the analysts are still foolish enough to rate Amazon as a tech company and not as a Walmart competitor that does some tech; they don't have great ways to classify these companies. It doesnt seem like yahoo is doing foolish things, it might be more of a bellwether for the free everything and monetize the traffic industry.
- cpeterso 11y agoIf Yahoo cares about search, they should acquire DuckDuckGo. Both search engines use Bing on the backend, but the scrappy team at DuckDuckGo has built a much smarter search experience and UI than the entire Yahoo search team. What would be a fair valuation of DuckDuckGo?