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> That being said, if you ARE going to judge her by contemporary CEO standards, the question is, would anyone else have done better? The first mistake the Yaho

> That being said, if you ARE going to judge her by contemporary CEO standards, the question is, would anyone else have done better? The first mistake the Yahoo board made was to decide that product innovation would save them. In reality, they should've brought in an ex-consultant or ex-banker who could chop off pieces of the business and sell them to the highest bidder (essentially, what's going to happen now). The second mistake they made was that they decided the right person to execute on a product strategy was Marissa Mayer, when in reality that isn't her strong suit.

rms_returns 11y ago
> The first mistake the Yahoo board made was to decide that product innovation would save them. If they had given some proper direction to their innovation, perhaps that could have saved them. One stupid decision they made back in 2006 was to shutdown geo-cities. The data hype hadn't even begun at that time and with some vision they could have turned geo-cities into a thing similar to what cloud-hosted services like aws are doing today. Again, yui and yii were (and to some extent still are) great frameworks created by Yahoo. They should have tried to capitalize on that front, maybe offered paid support or created CMSs on top of them like eCommerce and/or web-based CRM systems. I know there is competition in this field, but a high quality web-based product coming from Yahoo Inc. would have been very well-received by the industry.
- taurath 11y ago
  They got rid of all the visionary people a while ago.
frik 11y ago
The biggest mistake was to shutdown their own search engine, and pay for Bing search results. And their Ads-deal with MSFT wasn't that long-term successful. Yahoo had the biggest Hadoop cluster back in 2009, the were at the forefront of big data and contributed to many open source projects. Then everything went downhill. Now Yahoo has what? Flickr, Tumblr, Mail, ...? Right, they own a stack of Alibaba (China), and now close or sell everything else. Sad, hopefully Flickr, Tumblr and some other good services survive.
- avn2109 11y ago
  >> "Now Yahoo has what?" Yahoo finance is still pretty much best in class for free finance services. They should have run with it - maybe it's not too late and they still can.
  - sremani 11y ago
    CNBC infiltrated everything financial, esp. since Fox Business came into existence. Nightly Business Report and Yahoo! finance, used to have separate coverage, but now NBR is pretty much CNBC and Yahoo! has pretty heavy CNBC presence. But still Yahoo! finance is the only Yahoo portal that has some semblance of quality. I want to like Yahoo! Tech esp. with Pogue in the ranks, but the UI of Yahoo! tech is a bit cluttered to me. Yahoo! sports, MM's refresh killed that thing.
  - throwayahoops9 11y ago
    The problem there was the redesign. You've got a bunch of, not quite AOL-level users, but they're 45-65 and set in their ways. That means the XP and IE6. OK, not quite that bad, but close. What they should have done was upgrade the tech - sure, use real frameworks. But the full-on AJAX UI "upgrade" was never perceived as an upgrade. Let's look into why: Problem #1: The highest-ranking feature request since the day it went live has been "to make ignore mean ignore." Old behavior: I ignore userXXX, I never see anything. Current behavior: I ignore userXXX, I see exactly the same screen space for a post from userXXX, but it's greyed out. I still have to scroll by it. If I have two trolls arguing with each other or flooding the board with spam, all the content is pushed out of visibility at a rate of 20 posts per page click. The vertical page consists of 80% navigation elements and "Post hidden because you ignored this user." #2 feature request has been to deal with the spam problem. Now that I can no longer effectively ignore users, I have userXXX1234 spamming for PennyStocksWeekly and in the unlikely event that the spammer's account is terminated, I then have userXXX1235 signing up and spamming about "Penny Stock 101 org" or "Ultimate Stock Alerts." So Yahoo's filtered out URLs but it has yet to implement even the most trivial Bayesian filtering against these spammers. The exact same text strings are used - but because there's only a URL filter and no Bayesian filtering for obvious spam indicators, there is effectively no spam filtering on the message boards. https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/207809-finance-gs/category/68445-reporting-abuse https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/207809-finance-gs/categor... demonstrates the presence of long-term spammers on every board. And these spammers - see Problem #1 - cannot be ignored; users can ignore the words they use, but must still scroll past the large AJAX/mobile-friendly UI around the string "Post hidden because you ignored this user," Old Ignore Infrastructure Fail: There (prior to the big redesign) used to be a silent 1000-user limit (500? I forget what the number was) to the length of the ignore list. When the cap was hit, the user's account was effectively useless, unless the user wanted to manually (!) un-ignore a hundred spammer accounts in order to free up space on this list. Current Infrastructure Fail: Ignore or message rating or abuse-reporting just doesn't work. First off, the results for https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/207809-finance-gs/category/68433-error-messages?query=report%20abuse%20failed https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/207809-finance-gs/categor... continue to demonstrate the abuse reporting (and upvote/downvote) mechanism does not work consistently. This has been the case for years. This data has been available to Yahoo since the big transition: https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/207809-finance-gs/filters/top https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/207809-finance-gs/filters... It has been ignored for four years. It continues to be ignored. A once-dedicated core of high-value eyeballs has been driven away from the site. Most of them wound up at InvestorHub - http://investorshub.advfn.com/ http://investorshub.advfn.com/ has a site design straight out of the 90s. To these eyeballs, that was a feature, not a bug. Limits on account creation and posting quantity mostly solved the spam problem. They didn't want to leave; most left only because they realized their feedback to Yahoo was being ignored. tl;dr: Classic Agilista Fail mechanism. (edit: I apologize to people who are actually being agile, rather than Doing Agile(TM))) The finance message board teams got one or two sprints to make a new UI. They succeeded. The feedback was sufficiently negative and the unresolved issues large (i.e., making the ignore functionality work without breaking some underlying design assumption. Implementing a working spam filter, not just a simple URL filter. Moderators to deal with abuse reports) that they couldn't be done in one sprint. So none of them got done. And the users left.
mkohlmyr 11y ago
I think the brand and portal "product" could have been saved, but I agree the brand and portal could not save the current corporate entity. The brand and portal is a much smaller company than Yahoo of today and probably the current spin off should have been the original model along with some very heavy layoffs. My thoughts on saving the portal product, personally were always - Buy tumblr for ad sales potential - Buy digg.com and some smaller facebook page style properties to drive traffic and seo to news - Buy inside.com and essentially make that yahoo news. - Produce high quality streaming video news content, particularly finance. - Buy libsyn or podbay. With existing ad data yahoo could do targeted in-audio ads for streaming and download. - Double down on fantasy sports as a driver of daily visits. - Rebuild mail. Use it as a daily visits driver / cross promotion opportunity with minimal or no ads. - Spin flickr off to employees or sell it.

rms_returns 11y ago

> The first mistake the Yahoo board made was to decide that product innovation would save them. If they had given some proper direction to their innovation, perhaps that could have saved them. One stupid decision they made back in 2006 was to shutdown geo-cities. The data hype hadn't even begun at that time and with some vision they could have turned geo-cities into a thing similar to what cloud-hosted services like aws are doing today. Again, yui and yii were (and to some extent still are) great frameworks created by Yahoo. They should have tried to capitalize on that front, maybe offered paid support or created CMSs on top of them like eCommerce and/or web-based CRM systems. I know there is competition in this field, but a high quality web-based product coming from Yahoo Inc. would have been very well-received by the industry.

taurath 11y ago
They got rid of all the visionary people a while ago.

frik 11y ago

The biggest mistake was to shutdown their own search engine, and pay for Bing search results. And their Ads-deal with MSFT wasn't that long-term successful. Yahoo had the biggest Hadoop cluster back in 2009, the were at the forefront of big data and contributed to many open source projects. Then everything went downhill. Now Yahoo has what? Flickr, Tumblr, Mail, ...? Right, they own a stack of Alibaba (China), and now close or sell everything else. Sad, hopefully Flickr, Tumblr and some other good services survive.

avn2109 11y ago
>> "Now Yahoo has what?" Yahoo finance is still pretty much best in class for free finance services. They should have run with it - maybe it's not too late and they still can.
- sremani 11y ago
  CNBC infiltrated everything financial, esp. since Fox Business came into existence. Nightly Business Report and Yahoo! finance, used to have separate coverage, but now NBR is pretty much CNBC and Yahoo! has pretty heavy CNBC presence. But still Yahoo! finance is the only Yahoo portal that has some semblance of quality. I want to like Yahoo! Tech esp. with Pogue in the ranks, but the UI of Yahoo! tech is a bit cluttered to me. Yahoo! sports, MM's refresh killed that thing.
- throwayahoops9 11y ago
  The problem there was the redesign. You've got a bunch of, not quite AOL-level users, but they're 45-65 and set in their ways. That means the XP and IE6. OK, not quite that bad, but close. What they should have done was upgrade the tech - sure, use real frameworks. But the full-on AJAX UI "upgrade" was never perceived as an upgrade. Let's look into why: Problem #1: The highest-ranking feature request since the day it went live has been "to make ignore mean ignore." Old behavior: I ignore userXXX, I never see anything. Current behavior: I ignore userXXX, I see exactly the same screen space for a post from userXXX, but it's greyed out. I still have to scroll by it. If I have two trolls arguing with each other or flooding the board with spam, all the content is pushed out of visibility at a rate of 20 posts per page click. The vertical page consists of 80% navigation elements and "Post hidden because you ignored this user." #2 feature request has been to deal with the spam problem. Now that I can no longer effectively ignore users, I have userXXX1234 spamming for PennyStocksWeekly and in the unlikely event that the spammer's account is terminated, I then have userXXX1235 signing up and spamming about "Penny Stock 101 org" or "Ultimate Stock Alerts." So Yahoo's filtered out URLs but it has yet to implement even the most trivial Bayesian filtering against these spammers. The exact same text strings are used - but because there's only a URL filter and no Bayesian filtering for obvious spam indicators, there is effectively no spam filtering on the message boards. https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/207809-finance-gs/category/68445-reporting-abuse https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/207809-finance-gs/categor... demonstrates the presence of long-term spammers on every board. And these spammers - see Problem #1 - cannot be ignored; users can ignore the words they use, but must still scroll past the large AJAX/mobile-friendly UI around the string "Post hidden because you ignored this user," Old Ignore Infrastructure Fail: There (prior to the big redesign) used to be a silent 1000-user limit (500? I forget what the number was) to the length of the ignore list. When the cap was hit, the user's account was effectively useless, unless the user wanted to manually (!) un-ignore a hundred spammer accounts in order to free up space on this list. Current Infrastructure Fail: Ignore or message rating or abuse-reporting just doesn't work. First off, the results for https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/207809-finance-gs/category/68433-error-messages?query=report%20abuse%20failed https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/207809-finance-gs/categor... continue to demonstrate the abuse reporting (and upvote/downvote) mechanism does not work consistently. This has been the case for years. This data has been available to Yahoo since the big transition: https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/207809-finance-gs/filters/top https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/207809-finance-gs/filters... It has been ignored for four years. It continues to be ignored. A once-dedicated core of high-value eyeballs has been driven away from the site. Most of them wound up at InvestorHub - http://investorshub.advfn.com/ http://investorshub.advfn.com/ has a site design straight out of the 90s. To these eyeballs, that was a feature, not a bug. Limits on account creation and posting quantity mostly solved the spam problem. They didn't want to leave; most left only because they realized their feedback to Yahoo was being ignored. tl;dr: Classic Agilista Fail mechanism. (edit: I apologize to people who are actually being agile, rather than Doing Agile(TM))) The finance message board teams got one or two sprints to make a new UI. They succeeded. The feedback was sufficiently negative and the unresolved issues large (i.e., making the ignore functionality work without breaking some underlying design assumption. Implementing a working spam filter, not just a simple URL filter. Moderators to deal with abuse reports) that they couldn't be done in one sprint. So none of them got done. And the users left.

mkohlmyr 11y ago

I think the brand and portal "product" could have been saved, but I agree the brand and portal could not save the current corporate entity. The brand and portal is a much smaller company than Yahoo of today and probably the current spin off should have been the original model along with some very heavy layoffs. My thoughts on saving the portal product, personally were always - Buy tumblr for ad sales potential - Buy digg.com and some smaller facebook page style properties to drive traffic and seo to news - Buy inside.com and essentially make that yahoo news. - Produce high quality streaming video news content, particularly finance. - Buy libsyn or podbay. With existing ad data yahoo could do targeted in-audio ads for streaming and download. - Double down on fantasy sports as a driver of daily visits. - Rebuild mail. Use it as a daily visits driver / cross promotion opportunity with minimal or no ads. - Spin flickr off to employees or sell it.