7 ms·

Yahoo time and again releases open source software which is super super helpful to the community at large. But it always makes me wonder why an org with such an

Yahoo time and again releases open source software which is super super helpful to the community at large. But it always makes me wonder why an org with such an amazing engg culture (multiple anecdotes from friends who were at Yahoo, plus the amazing experiences at Yahoo OpenHack each year as a testament to this) could be run into the ground. Really goes to show that engg != business and unless you have a firm business model and growth, an amazing engg team can only get you so far. I know I'm just stating the obvious, but just putting it out there! Vespa looks super interesting (more so since I'm in a company that provides ecommerce search APIs as a product) and I'm sure I'll play with it more. Thanks Yahoo! :)

reacweb 9y ago
IMHO, yahoo has bad investors. One of the proof is the firing of Marissa Meyer. As soon as she was hired, the reputation of yahoo has started to improve. All the fights of investors against her until they make her leave had the opposite effect. It takes years to build a reputation and it takes more years for this reputation to bring dividends. I have a similar feeling for Microsoft. The reputation has (slowly) improved since the arrival of Satya Nadella. I which he succeeds to make it back a big player.
- talad 9y ago
  Meyer basically destroyed a healthy, but not growing, company in the span of 4 years through short-term number-massaging actions at the cost of their competent engineers and core product development. Nadella isn't making a particularly strong case for MS either with his seeming distaste for any product of theirs that isn't either mobile or cloud-based (like the ones where they actually have a monopoly to build off and no competition worth speaking of), which seems to arise from that 'chasing growth numbers' mindset.
  - crispytx 9y ago
    Yeah she was terrible. Their homepage still sucks, freezes up my browser all the time.
  - B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
    Microsoft products? "Windows is a service" is the word now, as firmly stated by a recent message demanding a PC reboot. (The first sentence was "Windows is a service and updates are a normal part of keeping it running smoothly.")
    - cat199 9y ago
      to their "credit", this doesn't actually mean anything given the msft ability to misuse language consistently to make it sound more magical like
  - reacweb 9y ago
    I am not in America, but when she arrived, I was very curious to see how she could revived such a dying zombie. Clients and engineers were leaving as hell. IMHO, she has done a lot to reduce the hemorrhage and make it attractive again.
    - jonknee 9y ago
      > IMHO, she has done a lot to reduce the hemorrhage and make it attractive again. What are you talking about? She's no longer employed and Yahoo has been sold off to Verizon...
      - reacweb 9y ago
        I replied to the rewrite of history of yahoo, in particular that yahoo was healthy before Marissa Meyer arrived. IMHO, she had a positive effect on yahoo during her presence.
  - eip 9y ago
    >Meyer basically destroyed a healthy, but not growing, company in the span of 4 years So she did exactly what Google paid her to do. Eliminate a competitor. How dumb do you have to be to hire a CEO from high in the ranks of your biggest rival?
- baybal2 9y ago
  Boardroom drama and IR conference calls turning into a 4chan style discussions are characteristic of Big Co. culture as such in US. The few successful big companies that evaded that predicament, were the ones with either poison pill provisions, or other tricks that made them "taste bad" for activist investors and other nasty guys from financial industry Loss of direction is what stalls big tech companies 9 times out of 10. If you have 10 decision making actors on the board of directors, you have to effectively do 10 different things that each of that guys want, and all of them with compromises made to accommodate the 9 remaining other things that had to be done simultaneously. My father frequently says that "a public company is a like a woman with 10 husbands, all trying to make love to her at the same time"
bryanrasmussen 9y ago
ok if I ask what company, I have some interest in the area.
igor_filippov 9y ago
Because often there's no correlation between engineering culture and business.
- relyio 9y ago
  I haven't had the longest career, but the little I have see empirically confirmed to me that there's actually a strong connection between engineering culture and business success. Of course, a great engineering culture alone is not enough, but it can act as multiplicative factor.
  - samfisher83 9y ago
    I would think they aren't all that correlated. Look at apple, Steve job treated some of his engineers like crap and they were successful. Its nice to have a good place to work, but I don't think it ensures success.
    - cat199 9y ago
      This doesn't necessarily mean a 'bad culture' - a) the concept of 'tough love' is applicable b) were engineers allowed and challenged to innovate? or did their work effort primarily consist of navigating red tape and beurocracy to the point that all creativity was crushed? etc. see also: dilbert.
    - relyio 9y ago
      To me a good engineering culture isn't a "nice" engineering culture, it is one where the company consistently delivers outstanding work that is on point with business requirements.
  - weego 9y ago
    In an engineering centric product. Why would a mom and pop email / news / casual gaming portal succeed directly because of good engineering? Time and time again we massively over-play our role in many business stories.
overcast 9y ago
Juicero had an amazing engineering culture. Look where that went. You need a proper management team to wrangle it in. Clearly Yahoo has made mistakes in that aspect.
- wonderous 9y ago
  Not sure that Juicero is a good example good engineering, "Do You Need a $400 Juicer?" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5lutHF5HhVA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5lutHF5HhVA
  - michaelbuckbee 9y ago
    I think you and the parent comment are both partially right - from having watched a number of teardowns, the Juicero was (if anything) massively over-engineered in terms of number of parts, cost of those parts, how they were machined, etc. It was also kind of clear that it went too far, that a more experienced hardware design and engineering team would have found (not a cheaper), but a more effective way to handle those same challenges.
    - voxadam 9y ago
      This reminds me all too much of Coffee Equipment Company which back around 2005 built the world's greatest coffee machine, Clover. Unfortunately, at $11k per machine even Starbucks, after buying the company, wasn't able to find a profitable niche for it. Clover machines were, are, beautiful machines that are able to repeatedly and dependably turn out genuinely great cup after great caffeinated cup; the problem is that it was a solution in search of a problem, much like Jucero.
    - fasquoika 9y ago
      >from having watched a number of teardowns, the Juicero was (if anything) massively over-engineered in terms of number of parts, cost of those parts, how they were machined, etc. What you mean to say is that the Juicero was overbuilt and underengineered. As the saying goes, "anyone can build a bridge, it takes an engineer to barely build it".
vidarh 9y ago
When I was there (2003-2005), the big problem already seemed to be that a lot of engineering saw Yahoo as a tech company, while a lot of the business side saw Yahoo as a media company. Especially so after Yahoo conceded Search. So one side wants to pour money into getting technical leverage. The other side largely just wanted more effective ways of publishing and monetizing content. It doesn't really matter which side was right, only that they were at times pulling in wildly different directions in terms of what they believed it was important to invest in.
- toast0 9y ago
  Yahoo's largest problem while I was there (2004-2011) was that nobody could articulate what y! is and what it does. Actually, at employee orientation in 2004, they had a clear mission: to be a part of everything you do online: either by doing it, or cobranding it, with a goal of being in the top 3 of every internet vertical. Somehow, over time, this message was lost, and it was no longer ok to be #2 or #3 in some verticals (like search), and having very healthy profit margins wasn't enough either. The Microsoft search deal was a bad deal, poorly executed, as well: Microsoft couldn't meet the monetization and performance requirements from the start (Microsoft paid out of pocket for a while for this), y! lost control of an important product, and the staffing reductions to search that were supposed to be enabled never came.
  - ismail 9y ago
    Interesting "to be a part of everything you do online: either by doing it, or cobranding it, with a goal of being in the top 3 of every internet vertical." Could you say that part of the reason they lost was a mission/purpose that from the above seems to be purely focused on internal value creation? No word on how they would benefit their customers? It does not say anything about the value it creates. Put another way should your purpose be something customer focused?
    - toast0 9y ago
      The customer focused version of this missionis 'to help users do everything they want to do online'. Part of doing everything is providing some form of discoverability, which takes the form of linking to other products -- big traffic drivers are links on the front page to major products, and integration with search, but also relevant cross linking within the more specific verticals -- at Y! Travel, we would use flickr photos, events from upcoming, share restaurant data with local, we would have done things with yahoo calendar if it was more usable, etc.
gyehuda 9y ago
The Register did a good job describing the dichotomy between the product business and the tech side of the business here, related to a previous open source project Yahoo published (disclaimer, I run the open source process at Yahoo) https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/23/yahoo_tensorflow_on_spark/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/23/yahoo_tensorflow_on... "Over the decades Yahoo! has contributed substantially to the greater good, publishing its own code as open source. Arguably Yahoo!’s greatest legacy once it is a division of Verizon will be big data, after one of its engineers – Doug Cutting – wrote an open-source implementation of Google’s MapReduce that became Hadoop. What followed was an entire ecosystem of startups and projects crunching data at scale – Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR to name three in a market some calculate will be worth $50bn by 2020."
- runT1ME 9y ago
  What do you mean you run the Open Source process at yahoo? Hopefully Verizon's open source legacy will become even bigger and make it easier for these kinds of innovations to happen. We've had some success a few cities over in Verizon Labs... https://verizon.github.io/ https://verizon.github.io/
  - gyehuda 9y ago
    My job is to manage the open source process for Oath (which is essentially Yahoo + AOL). That includes helping ensure we can publish code like this and the hundreds of other projects we publish too. I'm the one who cares about open source licenses, patent clauses, github permissions, etc. Many large tech companies have someone in a comparable role and some of us work together in the todogroup to help manage the way we do opensource. I'm beginning to meet the people in Verizon who do the same. I hope their open source legacy grows too. Heck I celebrate when Google, Amazon, and Comcast publish great code too. It's good for us all. But Vespa is a real treat. It's really really special to Yahoo and we are very hopeful that the Big Data community sees how many things they can do with this, at scale, the way we have.
    - caniszczyk 9y ago
hypertexthero 9y ago
Yes. Steve Jobs responding to a question about OpenDoc in 1997: > You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. https://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2011/06/08/wwdc-1997-video-steve-jobs-handles-a-public-insult/ https://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2011/06/08/wwdc-1997-video-s...
tw04 9y ago
See: DEC, Sun Microsystems. Engineering != Ability to make money. While none of us may like it, you almost always need a solid marketing and sales force to have a successful business.
- coredog64 9y ago
  Sun was making money, their problem was cash flow. Their primary customers were on Wall Street. They borrowed a bunch of money prior to the GFC, and right when they needed their Wall Street customers to be placing orders to cover payments on the debt, their customers were tightening their belts.
afandian 9y ago
What does "engg" stand for? A particular field of engineering?
martin1975 9y ago
Business is (mostly) about people and relationships. That's probably where Yahoo was lacking - not the engineering part.
ksec 9y ago
And they used to be a BSD shop as well, then Marrisa changed it to Linux I think.

reacweb 9y ago

IMHO, yahoo has bad investors. One of the proof is the firing of Marissa Meyer. As soon as she was hired, the reputation of yahoo has started to improve. All the fights of investors against her until they make her leave had the opposite effect. It takes years to build a reputation and it takes more years for this reputation to bring dividends. I have a similar feeling for Microsoft. The reputation has (slowly) improved since the arrival of Satya Nadella. I which he succeeds to make it back a big player.

talad 9y ago
Meyer basically destroyed a healthy, but not growing, company in the span of 4 years through short-term number-massaging actions at the cost of their competent engineers and core product development. Nadella isn't making a particularly strong case for MS either with his seeming distaste for any product of theirs that isn't either mobile or cloud-based (like the ones where they actually have a monopoly to build off and no competition worth speaking of), which seems to arise from that 'chasing growth numbers' mindset.
- crispytx 9y ago
  Yeah she was terrible. Their homepage still sucks, freezes up my browser all the time.
- B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
  Microsoft products? "Windows is a service" is the word now, as firmly stated by a recent message demanding a PC reboot. (The first sentence was "Windows is a service and updates are a normal part of keeping it running smoothly.")
  - cat199 9y ago
    to their "credit", this doesn't actually mean anything given the msft ability to misuse language consistently to make it sound more magical like
- reacweb 9y ago
  I am not in America, but when she arrived, I was very curious to see how she could revived such a dying zombie. Clients and engineers were leaving as hell. IMHO, she has done a lot to reduce the hemorrhage and make it attractive again.
  - jonknee 9y ago
    > IMHO, she has done a lot to reduce the hemorrhage and make it attractive again. What are you talking about? She's no longer employed and Yahoo has been sold off to Verizon...
    - reacweb 9y ago
      I replied to the rewrite of history of yahoo, in particular that yahoo was healthy before Marissa Meyer arrived. IMHO, she had a positive effect on yahoo during her presence.
- eip 9y ago
  >Meyer basically destroyed a healthy, but not growing, company in the span of 4 years So she did exactly what Google paid her to do. Eliminate a competitor. How dumb do you have to be to hire a CEO from high in the ranks of your biggest rival?
baybal2 9y ago
Boardroom drama and IR conference calls turning into a 4chan style discussions are characteristic of Big Co. culture as such in US. The few successful big companies that evaded that predicament, were the ones with either poison pill provisions, or other tricks that made them "taste bad" for activist investors and other nasty guys from financial industry Loss of direction is what stalls big tech companies 9 times out of 10. If you have 10 decision making actors on the board of directors, you have to effectively do 10 different things that each of that guys want, and all of them with compromises made to accommodate the 9 remaining other things that had to be done simultaneously. My father frequently says that "a public company is a like a woman with 10 husbands, all trying to make love to her at the same time"

bryanrasmussen 9y ago

ok if I ask what company, I have some interest in the area.

igor_filippov 9y ago

Because often there's no correlation between engineering culture and business.

relyio 9y ago
I haven't had the longest career, but the little I have see empirically confirmed to me that there's actually a strong connection between engineering culture and business success. Of course, a great engineering culture alone is not enough, but it can act as multiplicative factor.
- samfisher83 9y ago
  I would think they aren't all that correlated. Look at apple, Steve job treated some of his engineers like crap and they were successful. Its nice to have a good place to work, but I don't think it ensures success.
  - cat199 9y ago
    This doesn't necessarily mean a 'bad culture' - a) the concept of 'tough love' is applicable b) were engineers allowed and challenged to innovate? or did their work effort primarily consist of navigating red tape and beurocracy to the point that all creativity was crushed? etc. see also: dilbert.
  - relyio 9y ago
    To me a good engineering culture isn't a "nice" engineering culture, it is one where the company consistently delivers outstanding work that is on point with business requirements.
- weego 9y ago
  In an engineering centric product. Why would a mom and pop email / news / casual gaming portal succeed directly because of good engineering? Time and time again we massively over-play our role in many business stories.

overcast 9y ago

Juicero had an amazing engineering culture. Look where that went. You need a proper management team to wrangle it in. Clearly Yahoo has made mistakes in that aspect.

wonderous 9y ago
Not sure that Juicero is a good example good engineering, "Do You Need a $400 Juicer?" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5lutHF5HhVA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5lutHF5HhVA
- michaelbuckbee 9y ago
  I think you and the parent comment are both partially right - from having watched a number of teardowns, the Juicero was (if anything) massively over-engineered in terms of number of parts, cost of those parts, how they were machined, etc. It was also kind of clear that it went too far, that a more experienced hardware design and engineering team would have found (not a cheaper), but a more effective way to handle those same challenges.
  - voxadam 9y ago
    This reminds me all too much of Coffee Equipment Company which back around 2005 built the world's greatest coffee machine, Clover. Unfortunately, at $11k per machine even Starbucks, after buying the company, wasn't able to find a profitable niche for it. Clover machines were, are, beautiful machines that are able to repeatedly and dependably turn out genuinely great cup after great caffeinated cup; the problem is that it was a solution in search of a problem, much like Jucero.
  - fasquoika 9y ago
    >from having watched a number of teardowns, the Juicero was (if anything) massively over-engineered in terms of number of parts, cost of those parts, how they were machined, etc. What you mean to say is that the Juicero was overbuilt and underengineered. As the saying goes, "anyone can build a bridge, it takes an engineer to barely build it".

vidarh 9y ago

When I was there (2003-2005), the big problem already seemed to be that a lot of engineering saw Yahoo as a tech company, while a lot of the business side saw Yahoo as a media company. Especially so after Yahoo conceded Search. So one side wants to pour money into getting technical leverage. The other side largely just wanted more effective ways of publishing and monetizing content. It doesn't really matter which side was right, only that they were at times pulling in wildly different directions in terms of what they believed it was important to invest in.

toast0 9y ago
Yahoo's largest problem while I was there (2004-2011) was that nobody could articulate what y! is and what it does. Actually, at employee orientation in 2004, they had a clear mission: to be a part of everything you do online: either by doing it, or cobranding it, with a goal of being in the top 3 of every internet vertical. Somehow, over time, this message was lost, and it was no longer ok to be #2 or #3 in some verticals (like search), and having very healthy profit margins wasn't enough either. The Microsoft search deal was a bad deal, poorly executed, as well: Microsoft couldn't meet the monetization and performance requirements from the start (Microsoft paid out of pocket for a while for this), y! lost control of an important product, and the staffing reductions to search that were supposed to be enabled never came.
- ismail 9y ago
  Interesting "to be a part of everything you do online: either by doing it, or cobranding it, with a goal of being in the top 3 of every internet vertical." Could you say that part of the reason they lost was a mission/purpose that from the above seems to be purely focused on internal value creation? No word on how they would benefit their customers? It does not say anything about the value it creates. Put another way should your purpose be something customer focused?
  - toast0 9y ago
    The customer focused version of this missionis 'to help users do everything they want to do online'. Part of doing everything is providing some form of discoverability, which takes the form of linking to other products -- big traffic drivers are links on the front page to major products, and integration with search, but also relevant cross linking within the more specific verticals -- at Y! Travel, we would use flickr photos, events from upcoming, share restaurant data with local, we would have done things with yahoo calendar if it was more usable, etc.

gyehuda 9y ago

The Register did a good job describing the dichotomy between the product business and the tech side of the business here, related to a previous open source project Yahoo published (disclaimer, I run the open source process at Yahoo) https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/23/yahoo_tensorflow_on_spark/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/23/yahoo_tensorflow_on... "Over the decades Yahoo! has contributed substantially to the greater good, publishing its own code as open source. Arguably Yahoo!’s greatest legacy once it is a division of Verizon will be big data, after one of its engineers – Doug Cutting – wrote an open-source implementation of Google’s MapReduce that became Hadoop. What followed was an entire ecosystem of startups and projects crunching data at scale – Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR to name three in a market some calculate will be worth $50bn by 2020."

runT1ME 9y ago
What do you mean you run the Open Source process at yahoo? Hopefully Verizon's open source legacy will become even bigger and make it easier for these kinds of innovations to happen. We've had some success a few cities over in Verizon Labs... https://verizon.github.io/ https://verizon.github.io/
- gyehuda 9y ago
  My job is to manage the open source process for Oath (which is essentially Yahoo + AOL). That includes helping ensure we can publish code like this and the hundreds of other projects we publish too. I'm the one who cares about open source licenses, patent clauses, github permissions, etc. Many large tech companies have someone in a comparable role and some of us work together in the todogroup to help manage the way we do opensource. I'm beginning to meet the people in Verizon who do the same. I hope their open source legacy grows too. Heck I celebrate when Google, Amazon, and Comcast publish great code too. It's good for us all. But Vespa is a real treat. It's really really special to Yahoo and we are very hopeful that the Big Data community sees how many things they can do with this, at scale, the way we have.
  - caniszczyk 9y ago

hypertexthero 9y ago

Yes. Steve Jobs responding to a question about OpenDoc in 1997: > You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. https://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2011/06/08/wwdc-1997-video-steve-jobs-handles-a-public-insult/ https://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2011/06/08/wwdc-1997-video-s...

tw04 9y ago

See: DEC, Sun Microsystems. Engineering != Ability to make money. While none of us may like it, you almost always need a solid marketing and sales force to have a successful business.

coredog64 9y ago
Sun was making money, their problem was cash flow. Their primary customers were on Wall Street. They borrowed a bunch of money prior to the GFC, and right when they needed their Wall Street customers to be placing orders to cover payments on the debt, their customers were tightening their belts.

afandian 9y ago

What does "engg" stand for? A particular field of engineering?

martin1975 9y ago

Business is (mostly) about people and relationships. That's probably where Yahoo was lacking - not the engineering part.

ksec 9y ago

And they used to be a BSD shop as well, then Marrisa changed it to Linux I think.