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Anybody who wants to think about "saving" Yahoo must read PG's essay on Yahoo: http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html It's a

Anybody who wants to think about "saving" Yahoo must read PG's essay on Yahoo: http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html It's a bit dated but relevant. 2 steps must be taken first before you can talk about "saving" Yahoo: 1. Get rid of 2/3 of the managers 2. Make engineers the "top dogs" in the company.

nahname 11y ago
>The first time I visited Google, they had about 500 people, the same number Yahoo had when I went to work there. But boy did things seem different. It was still very much a hacker-centric culture. I remember talking to some programmers in the cafeteria about the problem of gaming search results (now known as SEO), and they asked "what should we do?" Programmers at Yahoo wouldn't have asked that. Theirs was not to reason why; theirs was to build what product managers spec'd. I remember coming away from Google thinking "Wow, it's still a startup." A desire and the ability to own problems is difficult to bring back once it is lost.
- seivan 11y ago
  The desire never goes away, it just gets invested in side-projects that end up in graveyards because of work fatigue.
- mrtron 11y ago
  You should visit the Tumblr offices. Google -> Yahoo is a smaller jump away from an engineering driven company than Yahoo -> Tumblr
geoffreykeating 11y ago
That PG essay is the bomb. Can't imagine a world where Microsoft inspired that much fear : )
- guiomie 11y ago
  Not sure why you got downvoted. I like his ending statement: "Hacker culture often seems kind of irresponsible. That's why people proposing to destroy it use phrases like "adult supervision." That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example."
- frik 11y ago
  > Can't imagine a world where Microsoft inspired that much fear :) First it's not funny. Many companies including Netscape, Google (and at the moment PaaS companies) have/had the fear that Microsoft will crush them. You are either too young, or an employee of MS, otherwise nothing funny about. Maybe you should read pg's essay: "Another big factor was the fear of Microsoft. If anyone at Yahoo considered the idea that they should be a technology company, the next thought would have been that Microsoft would crush them. It's hard for anyone much younger than me to understand the fear Microsoft still inspired in 1995. Imagine a company with several times the power Google has now, but way meaner. It was perfectly reasonable to be afraid of them. Yahoo watched them crush the first hot Internet company, Netscape. It was reasonable to worry that if they tried to be the next Netscape, they'd suffer the same fate. How were they to know that Netscape would turn out to be Microsoft's last victim?"
- pjc50 11y ago
  The threatened world was where IE6 and ActiveX won, where websites routinely insisted on running unsandboxed native code in the browser to implement closed source client-server applications. Where both client and server had to be Microsoft in order to interoperate, paying MS license fees for every client and server. Where sufficiently successful application developers got the phone call from Microsoft offering to either lowball buyout their company or Microsoft would ship a competing product for free in their next release. (Containerisation would be absurdly expensive in this world, as you'd need a new Windows Server license for every VM. I think you still do, so nobody does this).
justalittlevain 11y ago
And get rid of the purple, it's hideous.
- justalittlevain 11y ago
  You downvote, but I've talked to countless people that hate their branding, purple being a large part of it. Don't disregard good aesthetic taste, Yahoo clearly doesn't have it.
  - jkaunisv1 11y ago
    I can't speak to what their actual audience is, but I've always imagined it as the average middle-aged middle-American. Which makes me think of Marie from Breaking Bad - her whole house is varying shades of that purple. What demographic are the people you've talked to in?
seivan 11y ago
Yishan Wong writes a lot about that to. http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/ http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/
yuhong 11y ago
I wonder if a similar lesson may apply to hardware. Take 8086 vs iAPX 432 for example.

nahname 11y ago

>The first time I visited Google, they had about 500 people, the same number Yahoo had when I went to work there. But boy did things seem different. It was still very much a hacker-centric culture. I remember talking to some programmers in the cafeteria about the problem of gaming search results (now known as SEO), and they asked "what should we do?" Programmers at Yahoo wouldn't have asked that. Theirs was not to reason why; theirs was to build what product managers spec'd. I remember coming away from Google thinking "Wow, it's still a startup." A desire and the ability to own problems is difficult to bring back once it is lost.

seivan 11y ago
The desire never goes away, it just gets invested in side-projects that end up in graveyards because of work fatigue.
mrtron 11y ago
You should visit the Tumblr offices. Google -> Yahoo is a smaller jump away from an engineering driven company than Yahoo -> Tumblr

geoffreykeating 11y ago

That PG essay is the bomb. Can't imagine a world where Microsoft inspired that much fear : )

guiomie 11y ago
Not sure why you got downvoted. I like his ending statement: "Hacker culture often seems kind of irresponsible. That's why people proposing to destroy it use phrases like "adult supervision." That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example."
frik 11y ago
> Can't imagine a world where Microsoft inspired that much fear :) First it's not funny. Many companies including Netscape, Google (and at the moment PaaS companies) have/had the fear that Microsoft will crush them. You are either too young, or an employee of MS, otherwise nothing funny about. Maybe you should read pg's essay: "Another big factor was the fear of Microsoft. If anyone at Yahoo considered the idea that they should be a technology company, the next thought would have been that Microsoft would crush them. It's hard for anyone much younger than me to understand the fear Microsoft still inspired in 1995. Imagine a company with several times the power Google has now, but way meaner. It was perfectly reasonable to be afraid of them. Yahoo watched them crush the first hot Internet company, Netscape. It was reasonable to worry that if they tried to be the next Netscape, they'd suffer the same fate. How were they to know that Netscape would turn out to be Microsoft's last victim?"
pjc50 11y ago
The threatened world was where IE6 and ActiveX won, where websites routinely insisted on running unsandboxed native code in the browser to implement closed source client-server applications. Where both client and server had to be Microsoft in order to interoperate, paying MS license fees for every client and server. Where sufficiently successful application developers got the phone call from Microsoft offering to either lowball buyout their company or Microsoft would ship a competing product for free in their next release. (Containerisation would be absurdly expensive in this world, as you'd need a new Windows Server license for every VM. I think you still do, so nobody does this).

justalittlevain 11y ago

And get rid of the purple, it's hideous.

justalittlevain 11y ago
You downvote, but I've talked to countless people that hate their branding, purple being a large part of it. Don't disregard good aesthetic taste, Yahoo clearly doesn't have it.
- jkaunisv1 11y ago
  I can't speak to what their actual audience is, but I've always imagined it as the average middle-aged middle-American. Which makes me think of Marie from Breaking Bad - her whole house is varying shades of that purple. What demographic are the people you've talked to in?

seivan 11y ago

Yishan Wong writes a lot about that to. http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/ http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/

yuhong 11y ago

I wonder if a similar lesson may apply to hardware. Take 8086 vs iAPX 432 for example.