7 ms·

Has there ever been a successful turnaround of a software company of Yahoo's scale? Mayer has been tech news' pinata for over a year now, but the company was sl

by dexwiz 10y ago

Has there ever been a successful turnaround of a software company of Yahoo's scale? Mayer has been tech news' pinata for over a year now, but the company was sliding before she was even hired. Looking through a list of dead Yahoo services, it reads as an obituary of region specific social networking sites and forgettable web services[1]. Social sites are notoriously fickle, and boosting one to popularity is somewhat of a dark art. Web services are a dime a dozen, and Google or Facebook probably has a better one. Yahoo seemed like it failed to break into any enterprise offerings either. Poor leadership, and failure to attract talent. They didn't have the same culture pull as Google/Facebook/Apple in the latest tech bubble. And why work for Yahoo if you could do the same thing with VCs funneling you money? I think one of the most telling things is the lack of OSS from Yahoo. Their top repo on github has been effectively dead for around a year [2]. Yahoo hasn't been a tech company is almost a decade, and it shows in their products. Not even their numerous acquihires have netted them anything. EDIT: Looking at a timeline of Yahoo, they haven't launched a major product since 2006 (10 years). All new products have been bought [3]. Imagine if Google's last product was Docs. No Android, no Doubleclick, no Street View, no autocomplete in search, no Chrome. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Yahoo!-owned_sites_and_services#Closed.2Fdefunct_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Yahoo!-owned_sites_and... [2] https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=user%3Ayahoo&ref=searchresults&s=stars&type=Repositories&utf8=%E2%9C%93 https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=user%3Ayahoo&ref=searchre... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Yahoo!#2006 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Yahoo!#2006

jldugger 10y ago
> Has there ever been a successful turnaround of a software company of Yahoo's scale? Intel and IBM come to mind.
- dexwiz 10y ago
  Neither of which are software companies. That is to say they offer hardware and services.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    There are very few pure-play software companies. Microsoft is simply alone in its class as a large, pure-play, shrinkwrap software company. Adobe might come close. IBM, Oracle, SAS, PWC, Deloitte, McKinsey, PeopleSoft, and many other firms bundled software with at the very least consulting services. IBM, along with Sun, HP, Digital, and other vendors sold (or leased) both hardware and software, along with consulting services. Smaller software companies have existed, but have been notoriously fickle. Novell existed as a network services company, doing well for a while, but ultimately faltering. EDS is probably the closest thing to a precursor to today's SaaS / XaaS companies, and was ultimately in the services business and bought by HP IIRC. I've been looking at this question for nearly two decades, and the most substantive conclusion I've come to was that Microsoft was a unicorn, a lone star, a singleton. And yet everyone's tried to emulated them. Or at least did until Google came along and cracked a different market.
    - dexwiz 10y ago
      That is a good point. Google is also a hardware company, they just didn't sell any of it until recently (App Engine/Cloud).
      - dredmorbius 10y ago
        Google generate revenue through advertising, and more of that by locking up the advertising networks and market than through user data. They also have exceptionally good technical execution on backbone infrastructure. I'm impressed by how good they are, I really am. As well as at not fucking up upgrades to software that runs on top of that. But their understanding of, and attitudes toward, end users really, really, really stinks. Perhaps not massively worse than the rest of the industry, but certainly no better.
    - kalleboo 10y ago
      I would have used Microsoft as an example of a former software company that has started banking on hardware (Xbox, Surface, Nokia)
- acchow 10y ago
  I think Intel is mostly hardware and IBM is mostly consulting?
  - msh 10y ago
    The IBM turn around was turning them into a consulting company. Might not be the most glamorous turn around but compared to yahoo...
  - AlisdairO 10y ago
    IBM has a large consulting arm (although it is shrinking IIRC), but they also still have an enormous software business that brings in many billions in profit every year. Hardware is shrinking but still pretty damn big.
nostromo 10y ago
Apple, of course. It's probably the biggest turn-around story of our time.
- ams6110 10y ago
  Apple turned around by moving much more heavily into consumer hardware, specifically the iPod and then the iPhone and iPad. It was not really a software turnaround, though that was a smaller part of it.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - lsc 10y ago
    was it, though? I mean, none of the apple hardware is amazing, and today, it's not even really different, but... the software mostly works, and for computers? that's amazing. I remember in the mid aughts, when I had been working exclusively with linux for some time, I started to see my peers, peers who wouldn't be caught dead with a windows laptop, carrying around os-x laptops. Compared to the ThinkPad of the day, the macbooks were terrible pieces of hardware; they were obviously designed by people who believed in style over substance, and their keyboard was mush. But... OS-X? OS-X mostly worked, something that could not be said for windows or linux laptops, not without a whole lot of effort.
    - neotek 10y ago
      Pretty much all of Apple's hardware is amazing. If you try and evaluate them on specs alone then sure, they fall short - less RAM in their phones, slower clock speeds, whatever - but the vast majority of people don't buy hardware because of its technical specs, they buy hardware because it looks gorgeous, makes them feel special, and performs the tasks they need it to perform. Nobody ever lined up for a week to buy a ThinkPad.
      - chansecodina 10y ago
        The key part phrase there is "[c]ompared to the ThinkPad of the day". IMHO, MacBooks and ThinkPads were nowhere near comparable in build quality until the the MacBooks went to unibody aluminum construction.
patmcguire 10y ago
No, but software companies of Yahoo's scale are either established within the past 20 years or Microsoft. That doesn't give a lot of time for things to go great, then get well and truly fucked, and then come back from the brink.
cpeterso 10y ago
> Imagine if Google's last product was Docs. No Android, no Doubleclick, no Street View, no autocomplete in search, no Chrome. Android, DoubleClick, Google Maps (Where 2, ZipDash), Google Earth (Keyhole), and Google Docs (Writely, 2Web, Tonic, DocVerse, Quickoffice) were built of acquisitions, not new Google products. Chrome, too, in a sense (WebKit). Thought experiment: what if Yahoo!, not Google, had acquired all those companies instead?
- douche 10y ago
  I wonder if I'd be using a Samsung WP10 model, instead of a Galaxy, still using Firefox, and using the Office365 suite. Maybe MapQuest, again.
- carterehsmith 10y ago
  They _did_ buy Tumblr and all you ever read about that is Yahoo writing off more of the Tumblr value. How are their other acquisitions doing?
  - fheisler 10y ago
    http://gizmodo.com/heres-what-happened-to-all-of-marissa-mayers-yahoo-acqu-1781980352 http://gizmodo.com/heres-what-happened-to-all-of-marissa-may...
- tuxracer 10y ago
  Even Docs was acquired https://techcrunch.com/2006/03/09/writely-confirms-google-acquisition/ https://techcrunch.com/2006/03/09/writely-confirms-google-ac...
hkmurakami 10y ago
Does Redhat count?
- ghaff 10y ago
  Red Hat has been consistently successful since it's been a company of any appreciable scale so it's not an example of a turnaround of a (moderately) big software company.
tomc1985 10y ago
That's harsh. There are a handful of top-notch products with great features that I would really like to see stay around in their current form. (Yahoo Finance and Flickr come to mind.) Plus, while they are what they are now, you can't necessarily deny open-source contributions in the past. YUI is impressive in its scope, for one.
jonknee 10y ago
> Has there ever been a successful turnaround of a software company of Yahoo's scale? Is Yahoo a software company? They don't claim to be (I think it's currently a media company).
dailo10 10y ago
Regarding OSS - Yahoo was behind Hadoop, the platform for big data and distributed computing. HBase, Spark, Storm, etc. are all built on top of Hadoop. Gotta give them credit for that one.
- cdibona 10y ago
  Sure, but Doug started that at Yahoo some 12 years ago now... I don't relish Yahoo's demise, but Hadoop isn't a great example of recent yahoo innovation....
wahsd 10y ago
Pretty much any tech company that made it out of the Tech Fraud of the 90s and is still alive. Yahoo just never managed to do anything but keep it's head above water for all those years and is now just simply running out of the momentum to continue doing so. Mayer has not been a pinata, blame the board for hiring her if you want, but her job was to come in and restructure and turn the company around. She simply does not have the skills to do that and her coat tail riding at Google was not going to help. It's a rather core problem in the valley, pervasive and endemic post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, i.e., since startup A is successful, that success must have come from the people involved. It totally ignores systemic shifts, inevitable developments, marketing and PR bullshit, and just plain stupid luck. It's why the whole tech sector relies on constant injections of cash or an exit by a giant that is swimming in cash and doesn't mind squandering it on fueling the tech nonsense. Mayer's "success" was solely derived from the "success" that google has had, which is simply based on a mixture of dumb luck and the single real success, a search engine and infrastructure that is good enough to beat all others and is used as a vehicle for ad revenue.

by dexwiz 10y ago

jldugger 10y ago

> Has there ever been a successful turnaround of a software company of Yahoo's scale? Intel and IBM come to mind.

dexwiz 10y ago
Neither of which are software companies. That is to say they offer hardware and services.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  There are very few pure-play software companies. Microsoft is simply alone in its class as a large, pure-play, shrinkwrap software company. Adobe might come close. IBM, Oracle, SAS, PWC, Deloitte, McKinsey, PeopleSoft, and many other firms bundled software with at the very least consulting services. IBM, along with Sun, HP, Digital, and other vendors sold (or leased) both hardware and software, along with consulting services. Smaller software companies have existed, but have been notoriously fickle. Novell existed as a network services company, doing well for a while, but ultimately faltering. EDS is probably the closest thing to a precursor to today's SaaS / XaaS companies, and was ultimately in the services business and bought by HP IIRC. I've been looking at this question for nearly two decades, and the most substantive conclusion I've come to was that Microsoft was a unicorn, a lone star, a singleton. And yet everyone's tried to emulated them. Or at least did until Google came along and cracked a different market.
  - dexwiz 10y ago
    That is a good point. Google is also a hardware company, they just didn't sell any of it until recently (App Engine/Cloud).
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      Google generate revenue through advertising, and more of that by locking up the advertising networks and market than through user data. They also have exceptionally good technical execution on backbone infrastructure. I'm impressed by how good they are, I really am. As well as at not fucking up upgrades to software that runs on top of that. But their understanding of, and attitudes toward, end users really, really, really stinks. Perhaps not massively worse than the rest of the industry, but certainly no better.
  - kalleboo 10y ago
    I would have used Microsoft as an example of a former software company that has started banking on hardware (Xbox, Surface, Nokia)
acchow 10y ago
I think Intel is mostly hardware and IBM is mostly consulting?
- msh 10y ago
  The IBM turn around was turning them into a consulting company. Might not be the most glamorous turn around but compared to yahoo...
- AlisdairO 10y ago
  IBM has a large consulting arm (although it is shrinking IIRC), but they also still have an enormous software business that brings in many billions in profit every year. Hardware is shrinking but still pretty damn big.

nostromo 10y ago

Apple, of course. It's probably the biggest turn-around story of our time.

ams6110 10y ago
Apple turned around by moving much more heavily into consumer hardware, specifically the iPod and then the iPhone and iPad. It was not really a software turnaround, though that was a smaller part of it.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- lsc 10y ago
  was it, though? I mean, none of the apple hardware is amazing, and today, it's not even really different, but... the software mostly works, and for computers? that's amazing. I remember in the mid aughts, when I had been working exclusively with linux for some time, I started to see my peers, peers who wouldn't be caught dead with a windows laptop, carrying around os-x laptops. Compared to the ThinkPad of the day, the macbooks were terrible pieces of hardware; they were obviously designed by people who believed in style over substance, and their keyboard was mush. But... OS-X? OS-X mostly worked, something that could not be said for windows or linux laptops, not without a whole lot of effort.
  - neotek 10y ago
    Pretty much all of Apple's hardware is amazing. If you try and evaluate them on specs alone then sure, they fall short - less RAM in their phones, slower clock speeds, whatever - but the vast majority of people don't buy hardware because of its technical specs, they buy hardware because it looks gorgeous, makes them feel special, and performs the tasks they need it to perform. Nobody ever lined up for a week to buy a ThinkPad.
    - chansecodina 10y ago
      The key part phrase there is "[c]ompared to the ThinkPad of the day". IMHO, MacBooks and ThinkPads were nowhere near comparable in build quality until the the MacBooks went to unibody aluminum construction.

patmcguire 10y ago

No, but software companies of Yahoo's scale are either established within the past 20 years or Microsoft. That doesn't give a lot of time for things to go great, then get well and truly fucked, and then come back from the brink.

cpeterso 10y ago

> Imagine if Google's last product was Docs. No Android, no Doubleclick, no Street View, no autocomplete in search, no Chrome. Android, DoubleClick, Google Maps (Where 2, ZipDash), Google Earth (Keyhole), and Google Docs (Writely, 2Web, Tonic, DocVerse, Quickoffice) were built of acquisitions, not new Google products. Chrome, too, in a sense (WebKit). Thought experiment: what if Yahoo!, not Google, had acquired all those companies instead?

douche 10y ago
I wonder if I'd be using a Samsung WP10 model, instead of a Galaxy, still using Firefox, and using the Office365 suite. Maybe MapQuest, again.
carterehsmith 10y ago
They _did_ buy Tumblr and all you ever read about that is Yahoo writing off more of the Tumblr value. How are their other acquisitions doing?
- fheisler 10y ago
  http://gizmodo.com/heres-what-happened-to-all-of-marissa-mayers-yahoo-acqu-1781980352 http://gizmodo.com/heres-what-happened-to-all-of-marissa-may...
tuxracer 10y ago
Even Docs was acquired https://techcrunch.com/2006/03/09/writely-confirms-google-acquisition/ https://techcrunch.com/2006/03/09/writely-confirms-google-ac...

hkmurakami 10y ago

Does Redhat count?

ghaff 10y ago
Red Hat has been consistently successful since it's been a company of any appreciable scale so it's not an example of a turnaround of a (moderately) big software company.

tomc1985 10y ago

That's harsh. There are a handful of top-notch products with great features that I would really like to see stay around in their current form. (Yahoo Finance and Flickr come to mind.) Plus, while they are what they are now, you can't necessarily deny open-source contributions in the past. YUI is impressive in its scope, for one.

jonknee 10y ago

> Has there ever been a successful turnaround of a software company of Yahoo's scale? Is Yahoo a software company? They don't claim to be (I think it's currently a media company).

dailo10 10y ago

Regarding OSS - Yahoo was behind Hadoop, the platform for big data and distributed computing. HBase, Spark, Storm, etc. are all built on top of Hadoop. Gotta give them credit for that one.

cdibona 10y ago
Sure, but Doug started that at Yahoo some 12 years ago now... I don't relish Yahoo's demise, but Hadoop isn't a great example of recent yahoo innovation....

wahsd 10y ago

Pretty much any tech company that made it out of the Tech Fraud of the 90s and is still alive. Yahoo just never managed to do anything but keep it's head above water for all those years and is now just simply running out of the momentum to continue doing so. Mayer has not been a pinata, blame the board for hiring her if you want, but her job was to come in and restructure and turn the company around. She simply does not have the skills to do that and her coat tail riding at Google was not going to help. It's a rather core problem in the valley, pervasive and endemic post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, i.e., since startup A is successful, that success must have come from the people involved. It totally ignores systemic shifts, inevitable developments, marketing and PR bullshit, and just plain stupid luck. It's why the whole tech sector relies on constant injections of cash or an exit by a giant that is swimming in cash and doesn't mind squandering it on fueling the tech nonsense. Mayer's "success" was solely derived from the "success" that google has had, which is simply based on a mixture of dumb luck and the single real success, a search engine and infrastructure that is good enough to beat all others and is used as a vehicle for ad revenue.