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Oil Traders May Be the Only Ones Who Want Yahoo to Survive
- powera 10y agoBecause they use Yahoo! Messenger, not because it will impact the oil market in any other way.
- twinkletwinkle 10y agoYeah I was disappointed when there wasn't some complicated economic phenomenon involved. They just all use one of Yahoo's products.
- sputknick 10y agoSounds like an opportunity for someone to buy yahoo messenger, make it work the way the oil industry wants it, and sell it to them as an industry specific chat service. No need to bring the rest of Yahoo along for the ride.
- IVDV 10y agoDefinitely the best way to ease the transition between chat services.
- test_log_5 10y agoGoogle Pivot, Cloud9. Those are the competitors trying to swoop in on this. FWIW, nat gas traders still use Aol Instant Messenger.
- profeta 10y agoyou forgot they are running a multi trillion dollar industry on free-as-in-beer software. I doubt they would pay $5 per user. or even a <your yearly salary> year flat fee. and since they will not pay, you will have to run it on ads. And supporting online/mobile offerings (that do not have their requirement of local client/local logs) will always give you more money. it is a lose/lose situation.
- leroy_masochist 10y agoI'd be willing to bet they'd pay for a seamless transition to a service that lets them keep their username, contact list, has the same UI, and basically works the same way as it did before.
- rs999gti 10y ago> you forgot they are running a multi trillion dollar industry on free-as-in-beer software. Isn't that the basis of enterprise linux?
- SolarNet 10y agoLinux is free-as-in-speech software. That means I could clone it in a week and sell a competing product when, say Ubuntu, starts to implode. Free-as-in-beer software doesn't have that.
- Godel_unicode 10y agoI think this is a false dichotomy, Linux is both free as in beer (unless you choose to pay for it) and free as in speech.
- SolarNet 10y agoYou're right it's not a dichotomy, but the property free-as-in-speech is the one that helps here, free-as-in-beer doesn't matter either way in this case (besides it's initial popularity).
- organsnyder 10y agoThere's a big difference between relying on a self-hosted product vs. a remote-hosted one. If your self-hosted software is suddenly no longer available, you have plenty of time to come up with a migration strategy, while you continue to use the obsolete product. If Yahoo Messenger went away, it would immediately disrupt business for all who rely on it. Not to mention that any enterprise Linux user worth their salt has an expensive support contract with a major vendor (such as Red Hat). Either that, or they're confident that they have the in-house resources to support it. No enterprise user considers Linux to be "free as in beer", by any stretch of the imagination; rather, they're using it because it's the right tool for the job.
- tacostakohashi 10y agoIt already works the way the oil industry wants - free, and no annoying sales people, contracts, authentication issues to deal with. A buyer that tried to "sell it to them as an industry specific chat service" would destroy it in the process.
- prof_hobart 10y agoIf no-one is prepared to pay for it, it's probably going to get destroyed at some point anyway. If something is absolutely critical to the running of your business, then at some point you need to at least consider paying for it.
- toyg 10y agoWhat it needs is probably a no-profit consortium dedicated to maintenance, with small fees. Industry members could then be peer-pressured into compliance. It would become a badge of honour, marketing expense etc etc.
- wj 10y agoI asked a former oil trader about this and he said, "Every oil trader/broker is on it globally. It replaced a large percentage of the voice traffic. It always shocked me that Yahoo never tried to charge for it. Even just a penny per message would be massive."
- spelunker 10y agoThis article seems to be making a mountain out of a molehill. Just use one of the competing, recordable chat services if Yahoo! Messenger disappears?
- mark-r 10y agoBut which one? It's all about the network effects. And losing the address you've had for 15 years isn't a trivial thing either.
- benkomen 10y agoDid you read all of the article. There is the problem of not everyone adopting the same chat service. Yahoo messenger works because everyone happens to have adopted it.
- anonymous7777 10y agoThis is insane. Why does guy who digs a hole and sell's oil need to care about high tech?!
- pjc50 10y agoOil industry is extremely high-tech.
- oh_sigh 10y agoNah, don't you know that the oil industry is just digging holes. Real high-tech is working on hard problems like how to deliver grilled cheese sandwiches
- Aloha 10y agoArtisanal, organic, locally sourced, (and optionally) vegan and gluten free grilled cheese sandwiches.
- bzbarsky 10y agoOrganic and gluten free oil should not be too hard. Locally sourced is pretty location-dependent. Artisanal may take more work; whether one considers petroleum vegan is an interesting philosophical question. I sense a business opportunity here; perhaps artisanal, organic, locally sourced oil sandwiches?
- 10y ago
- draw_down 10y agoThey can afford to build a messaging tool. Come on.
- tekklloneer 10y agoFlinging money at the network effect is a great way to lose money.
- ProAm 10y ago"If it ain't broke"
- imjustsaying 10y agoYou can afford to walk from Los Angeles to New York. Come on.
- neutralhogan 10y agoThey aren't the only ones who want Yahoo to survive. There are tens of people at Yahoo that want them to survive, too.
- 27182818284 10y agoI know someone in the oil industry and was surprised by this as well, but it is absolutely true. They really do use Yahoo a lot. When I asked why they haven't switched, I was given a response similar to what the articles says, "that all regulatory and internal controls are addressed" I believe natural gas communication is still done by AIM a lot.
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago> natural gas communication is still done by AIM a lot Lots of U.S. securities trading happens over AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). When I traded equity derivatives, I'd have three communication tools open: internal IM, Bloomberg chat and AIM.
- IVDV 10y agoWhen an industry is so reliant on one service, it's very difficult to shift an entire industry to a new platform. Segmentation is a real thing. A good example I'm familiar with is within electronic sports (competitive video-games): almost every executive, player, personality, etc has been using Skype since ~2010. Unfortunately, Skype has a large number of security vulnerabilities and users can be subjected by DDOS attacks- which is especially important if such an attack impacts their performance in a game, or interrupts a livestream. Even though there are, arguably, better products being created that serve the same purpose as Skype and that don't fall victim to this problem (Discord, Slack), those within the industry don't want to segment themselves from everyone else.
- elevensies 10y agoAnother issue is that asking someone to install a malware'd VOIP client is also a common scam: https://www.google.com/search?q=teamspeak+scam https://www.google.com/search?q=teamspeak+scam
- cookiecaper 10y agoThis problem could be solved if we fixed our tech access and intellectual property laws. The constricting elements of the online network effect only exist because we have laws that grant artificial monopolies. The only reason that Discord and/or Slack and/or OtherAlternative can't make it seamless is because Microsoft/Skype would likely file a lawsuit. While there are hairy intellectual property issues at play here, MS's best vein of attack would be the CFAA, which would almost certainly criminalize something like Slack connecting to Skype's network to offer an adapter/bridge between the two networks. People comment on the queer nature of this phenomenon frequently but seemingly fail to understand that it's that way because We The People made up laws dictating that it should be that way. There is no deprivation of either possession or use of property here, so why did we make this illegal? Let's fix the problem and allow true competition, instead of protecting lumbering incumbents.
- btown 10y agoAnd, for those unfamiliar with how crazy the CFAA can get, look no further than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz
- kchoudhu 10y agoWhy the hell aren't these chuckleheads on Bloomberg where they belong?
- peterkshultz 10y agoToo expensive. A Bloomberg terminal starts at $24,000. Not using a free IM service like Yahoo's seems like a fiduciary sin.
- kchoudhu 10y agoThe financial pain will be many times the cost of a Bloomberg terminal if market participants are unable to provide communications transcripts when regulators come calling.
- kristjansson 10y agoPer the article, the ability to log chats for compliance purposes is one of the factors keeping the industry on Yahoo's 'legacy' platform.
- FireBeyond 10y ago"Everyone, including harbormasters and terminal operators" Hard to see a harbormaster with a Bloomberg terminal.
- kchoudhu 10y agoDoes the same pathology apply in other commodity markets as well?
- leroy_masochist 10y agoMy understanding is that it does for anything that comes in bulk by boat. Copper, met coal, etc.
- 10y ago
- tim333 10y agoThe oil traders could move to WhatsApp or somesuch but I'd be kind of sad if they went. The other day I was trying to get free historical stock data via an API and Yahoo Finance was about the only thing that did it ok. Yahoo could assure their financial future by going massively long oil futures and then putting out false messages about Saudi Arabia having been nuked by ISIS or some such. A tad illegal perhaps but an offshoot in some ill policed part of the world could do it.
- MrMullen 10y agoCan you record your conversations (I think you can)? But most importantly, can you use WhatsApp without a cell phone number? It has to be tied to your email address and not a cell phone.
- meric 10y agoThe recorded conversations are gone when you switch devices. They are saved locally and not on the server.
- dasil003 10y agoThis sort of blew my mind when I discovered it since I often travel with a second phone and realized to my horror that I could not be logged into the same whatsapp from two phones. Is this the promise of a mobile-first app world?
- mahyarm 10y agoIt's the side effect of running a very learn architecture. It also has a side effect of not being able to secretly subpoena your chat history after the fact too. Now with E2E encryption they can't even do that easily.
- jcdavis 10y agoA lot of big tech companies also use Yahoo chat. Salesforce did as late as 2012 when I left, with 1k+ people in the eng org. (No idea if they still do). Seemed crazy at the same, still does now too
- WiseWeasel 10y agoDoubtful; Yahoo stopped supporting OS X in the last couple years with the official YIM client, and the service is completely unreliable on the platform with 3rd party clients, with messages randomly failing to be delivered. Pretty much any company with non-Windows users has been forced to migrate away, including my workplace (thank Jebus).
- smegel 10y ago> In Geneva, the epicenter of Switzerland’s $21 billion commodity-trading industry, accounting for about one-third of the world’s daily oil transactions That's pretty impressive for a country that has never even been visited by an oil tanker.
- rqebmm 10y agoI'm sure it has nothing to do with Switzerland's extremely strong financial privacy laws.
- omonra 10y agoAnd low taxes.
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago> Switzerland's extremely strong financial privacy laws We are also subject to relatively draconian surveillance [1]. [1] https://www.bestvpn.com/blog/30241/switzerland-passes-severe-new-surveillance-laws/ https://www.bestvpn.com/blog/30241/switzerland-passes-severe...
- test_log_5 10y agoTax rates for commodity transactions are low in comparison to other countries. Starbucks executes all their coffee trading out of Geneva. The commodity trade in Switzerland is as old as the hills.
- MagnumOpus 10y ago>old as the hills About as old as a 166-year-old artificial hillock, yes.
- gyardley 10y agoOnce everyone in an industry starts using a particular platform to do business, switching is very very hard. The porn industry still uses ICQ.
- angry-hacker 10y agoIs there a reason or just like with oil it happened? Do you happen to work in the industry?
- gyardley 10y agoNo, I don't work in the industry - but I have an acquaintance, and if I want to message him, he's rarely on anything but ICQ. As far as I know it's just 'tradition', like the oil industry - once ICQ hit critical mass it became the de facto standard.
- lordnacho 10y agoWhat do they use live chat for?
- Apocryphon 10y agoIsn't this superficially similar to the Westgroup storyline in season 2 of Halt and Catch Fire?
- pbreit 10y agoThis article seems ridiculous both because Yahoo messenger isn't going anywhere. And if it did, moving to another service would be a small hiccup.
- test_log_5 10y agoI don't believe the article to be ridiculous at all. I work in physical trading and use yahoo on a daily basis to trade swaps, execute physical deals, and chat with customers. If yahoo were to drop support unexpectedly, there would be a pretty large problem. We have already been briefed by our IT departments that we are moving to another service with the front end being one of the following - IceChat(from the ICE exchange), Reuters, Bloomberg, Trillian. Although Yahoo will be the back-end in protocol sense, I believe that will be phased out once the trade migrates to another service. It's a bigger problem than most imagine and can't be executed at a drop of a hat due to legal compliance in logging all communications in the case something went awry or other similar situations.
- javiramos 10y agoWhy didn't Yahoo focus on further developing businesses around these services (Finance, Fantasy etc.) that people love?
- niftich 10y agoHow do you monetize that? But they were adamant that they were a 'media company', so your point is very valid.
- slededit 10y agoFor financials? Charge for better data. Its a pretty solid industry, and seems to make Bloomberg lots of money.
- mistermann 10y agoI'd gladly pay for yahoo finance, especially if they made it less shitty.
- benkomen 10y agoYahoo has a huge number of services that remained popular with different groups of people well after they should have gone to dot.com hell - yahoo groups,answers, finance etc. I attribute their neglect to poor management and misplaced priorities. Yahoo could have been quora, instagram, pinterest etc. even well after those upstarts arrived on the scene.
- gaius 10y agoYahoo is more interested in the colour palette of its apps, than who its users are. No effective leadership is the problem.
- minikomi 10y agoCould this be a category to put startups into? Neglected Yahoo commodity as a service.
- 10y ago
- tomc1985 10y agoAnd Yahoo Messenger is stillll waay better than Slack
- peterkshultz 10y agoIf Yahoo goes under, perhaps they can open-source pieces of their product line.
- meric 10y agoIt sounds like Yahoo has wasted one opportunity after another. Yahoo clearly did not know why the oil industry is using Yahoo Messenger. Instead of doubling down and building a product for that market, they build a replacement product that's going to be detached from the needs of its users.
- zump 10y agoYou think Yahoo would release Yahoo Oil Messenger (tm)?
- meric 10y agoI have no idea what harbourmasters and oil traders do. But pretend harbourmasters look at maps and use the radio a lot, and oil traders like to look at positions of oil tankers, and charts of oil futures prices, a Yahoo Oil Messenger that lets users embed maps with positions of ships, charts of commodity prices within the conversation itself, view log of recorded radio transmissions, might be very useful. If Slack is worth $3.8 billion, I'd say a Yahoo Oil Messenger could be a billion dollar business, building an industry specific communications product. It's like Yahoo had all these tenements for the past decade and it's only when the tenements are expiring they finally found out there's bonanza of gold beneath, but it's way too late to do anything about it. With the new Yahoo chat product, it's like they registered some tenements next to their present ones and say something like "hey we got something nearby so it'll be alright."
- Apofis 10y agoI don't see why it's so difficult for them to introduce logging in the new messenger.
- zump 10y agoWhat's the salary of the oil trader?
- reDunDantReDund 10y agoWhile Yahoo’s ‘legacy’ Messenger service is recordable for compliance purposes, its new platform, launched in December, isn’t. UH, HOW'S ABOUT FIXING THAT, AND WHAMOLA? Seriously. Yahoo! as a brand struggles for post 1999 dot com crash relevance, and it refuses to budge on a single, trivial client-side feature, that requires zero overhead? And not only that, they refuse to do so for a loyal and influential subset of their users? I shudder to think of the stupid daily stand-ups where lazy bastards fart up reasons not to open up a reasonable portion of their service, at the expense of perhaps the entire service. ...unless, of course, the goal is to loose an albatross, and finally be free of messenger.
- tchitra 10y agoDoesn't this article feel like it was written for Yahoo's benefit? Since they have a blinded bidding process (See [1]), it seems as if this article could help drum up higher bids. Maybe Yahoo is the anonymous source that provided the "hot tip" about commodity traders on Yahoo Messenger. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-20/yahoo-bids-and-stock-lending https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-20/yahoo-bid...
- lordnacho 10y agoI don't know about the timing, but I have a relative in the industry and he told me it's actually the case. Everyone and their mom is on Yahoo chat when it comes to commodities.
- saiya-jin 10y agoconfirming, ex-gf who is commodity trader (coal, energy and oil lately) mentioned yahoo chat all the time. most of them are not very tech-savvy, so they are happy with it as long as it works
- Fuxy 10y agoIt was the first chat I ever used (besides IRC) and there's still a lot of people I con only reach there. It was quite popular in Eastern Europe as an IRC replacement since IRC was too difficult for the less computer savvy. These days most people have switched to Facebook Messanger since nobody wants the hassle if installing another messenger app.
- crumpled 10y agoI'm not sure it's a positive story. It suggests that yahoo will migrate these customers to a new platform that doesn't support the features they like and legally need.
- Hydraulix989 10y agoOne thing Yahoo has is an excellent university recruiting program with bombastic pampering, puzzle challenges, and hackathons. Seeing what other companies also have extremely hyped up university recruitment programs, I almost treat it now as a negative signal for a company's future success. I suppose the harder you have to try to win graduates' hearts, the less appealing you are to work for, and consequently, the worse off of a company you are going to be without the right kind of talent on staff going forward.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- DaOne256 10y agoThey should start using XMPP/Jabber. At the beginning with a Yahoo-Transport to be compatible with the people that are slower to switch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP#Connecting_to_other_protocols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP#Connecting_to_other_proto...
- havetocharge 10y agoIronically, if all these traders paid for the app, they might not have been scrambling now to find a replacement.
- cphoover 10y agoAnybody want to create a chat app tailored to securities trading? Seems like there is a market demand for an unobtrusive messaging app in this space.
- rwc 10y agoYou mean Symphony? https://symphony.com/ https://symphony.com/ https://next.ft.com/content/111e433c-5b8c-11e5-9846-de406ccb37f2 https://next.ft.com/content/111e433c-5b8c-11e5-9846-de406ccb...