15 ms·

The Glory That Was Yahoo

226 points by ohjeez 9y ago

jtth 9y ago
What glory? All these points were acquisitions. Everything this article celebrates were destroyed by Yahoo. The only thing they ever did well was build a portal.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  A lot of times they'd buy up companies just for the developers and then kill the product, like with Astrid Tasks (at least Microsoft didn't kill Wunderlist after acquiring it). I'm curious the number of devs that stayed at Yahoo past a year from these buyouts versus those who were like 'fuck this' and started looking for new work.
- Torwald 9y ago
  The free email account at Yahoo was a nice one too. The web client was really nicely done.
- BlueAThrow 9y ago
  I worked for AOL, who Verizon recently merged with Yahoo . It was inevitable they destroyed the startups . Yahoo processes made us look lean in comparison, and we were another old web 1.0 company . The first thing they make you do is port to their tech stack and so much time is spent on that process and approvals from central teams that it's a wonder anything gets done . They've got their own package manager, own internal ec2 clone, own build system, own Linux distro, own deploy system, and if any of those things were good it might make sense, but they're mid-2000s tech in quality . Flickr disappeared for a crucial year post merger, and apparently they were porting to Yahoo's internal account system: https://gizmodo.com/5910223/how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost-the-internet https://gizmodo.com/5910223/how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost... . At least that produced some user facing unification compared to some of the tasks we had . The attitude has not improved since .
  - praneshp 9y ago
    > , own internal ec2 clone, Are you talking about openstack/openhouse, or something else?
  - cmrdporcupine 9y ago
    Honestly, it's no different anywhere. BigCorp, no matter the quality, will acquire in the hopes of getting the 'special sauce' that comes with the startup but then proceeds to either force a rewrite, or poach all the people off, kill the product, or some other means of demotivating all people involved.
  - henrikschroder 9y ago
    > but they're mid-2000s tech in quality . This was the most disappointing part of being acquired. It was quite a wake-up call to realize that the culture inside Yahoo actually believed that their tech stack was good and competitive and that they were as innovative as Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Amazon. Nope. Yahoo obviously had a bunch of really clever people working there up until the year 2000, and they had to build a lot of things that didn't exist back then, because they were the first internet behemoth. But then all of those really clever people quit, and the company was left trying to steward the existing systems, while not having enough brainpower to create successor systems. So they were stuck, and a myopic "we're hot shit!" culture developed. Meanwhile, the rest of the world went on, and "Yahoo scale" just aren't very impressive numbers anymore, and their 2000's tech stacks are just horribly overly complex solutions.
  - empath75 9y ago
    I worked at aol and if yahoo’s stuff was worse I can’t imagine how bad it was.
  - zillow90 9y ago
    Are you in dialup internet services group? I heard AOL no longer sending dialer installer floppies.
  - notacoward 9y ago
    > They've got their own package manager, own internal ec2 clone, own build system, own Linux distro, own deploy system This exactly describes the current cadre of internet giants as well, and it does seem nuts, but it's important to realize why this happens. For one thing, these systems were often developed and made to run at scale well before their better known brethren appeared. Sometimes those better known brethren eventually surpass the internal tools. Sometimes they never do. > The first thing they make you do is port to their tech stack There's no simple answer to whether this is a good idea. Switching costs are a real thing. Even if what you're switching to is better, that superiority has to outweigh the cost of the transition itself. There's a cost to the parent company switching, and there's a cost to the acquiree switching. There's also a cost of running a bazillion different software stacks on ten kinds of hardware and operating systems, as I know AOL did in those days. Maybe that's part of the reason they stopped being a viable standalone company. The most successful post-acquisition tech merges I've seen have been very deliberate about the costs and benefits of changing each part, not adopting blanket "always" or "never" rules.
- pjc50 9y ago
  The title is a parody of "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Helen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Helen
jcloud_dev 9y ago
Impressive how consistently wrong were all the decisions on acquisitions and takeovers.
heedlessly2 9y ago
good job jerry yang
api 9y ago
Yahoo died because it forgot it was a technology company and stopped innovating. I've also heard that it developed an internal culture dominated by non-technical sales types who didn't understand how to manage their acquisitions or run a technology business and who de-valued those parts of the business. Didn't take long for them to get left in the dust by more innovative rivals.
velodrome 9y ago
Yahoo could not decide whether it was a technology company or media company...
- StevePerkins 9y ago
  The same could be said for most current tech titans. Some are just at different points along their lifecycle than others.
  - cmrdporcupine 9y ago
    Well, really, Google deliberately kept out of content provision for years in a way that Yahoo didn't. Google was only interested in being the gateway or the platform, not the publisher. That seems to have worked for them.
- azinman2 9y ago
  I could say the same about Facebook today.
overcast 9y ago
Only thing I ever found useful(and still do) is Yahoo Finance.
- azinman2 9y ago
  Guessing you’re young / missed the beginning of the net, because that’s when yahoo was king.
  - code_duck 9y ago
    Even back in the day, I preferred Altavista. I have never perceived yahoo or any of their products as good, or used any regularly, other than a few that were acquired like Flickr.
    - bluGill 9y ago
      yahoo was before Altavista. When they started a table of contents of the web it was great - back when the web was small enough that you could make a table of contents (at the time gopher was bigger than the web and growing faster, and gopher was mostly accessed via the table of contents). When Altavista came yahoo's index was better because instead of having to figure out the right search terms you could navigate a logical table of contents quickly. Then the web exploded (gopher was already all but dead) and it wasn't possible for yahoo to keep up, at which point search became the only hope. If Altavista hadn't quit updating their index for several months, they could have killed google just by keeping their index up to date and continuously refining their search algorithm. Of course this last is speculation but it is reasonable, google wasn't that much better.
      - mturmon 9y ago
        Well, Yahoo was founded in March 1995 and Altavista was opened in December 1995, which I think is generally the same time period. My perception as a technical user at the time is different than yours -- Altavista was much more influential to me than the curated table of contents that Yahoo had.
      - 9y ago
russellbeattie 9y ago
IT's amazing that something so simple as a not having a clear vision/mission could take down a successful company but that's the essentially what happened at Yahoo! When I worked there in 2004 it was just confused, chasing competitors and ideas, never deciding on what it wanted to be when it grew up. I left a year or so later and from what I saw it never figured itself out. I always wanted the company to focus on a mission about being "useful" - like the digital WD-40/duck tape of your life. Finance, news, fantasy-sports, email, messenger, groups, My Yahoo!, Delicious, Flickr... They're all useful. They could have continued to happily and profitably offer all of these services - and expanded to dozens more - under the mantra of being useful to our every day lives, but Yahoo! was never content with that. They wanted to be eBay, or Google, or Facebook, or YouTube or whoever else was a big player at the time, instead of focusing on the customer loyalty they had already generated. Having that clear core vision/mission seems like a small thing, but not having one crippled Yahoo! and caused infighting, turnover and confusion that eventually killed it. (Oh, and also Mayer was an idiot.)
- mmagin 9y ago
  It's kind of amazing it took so long for it to kill them.
- paulryanrogers 9y ago
  Google seems to be falling into a similar pattern with it's many different attempts at chat apps
  - stevenwoo 9y ago
    Google's income stream from advertising is not as vulnerable as Yahoo's home page for the internet model as far as I know.
    - joering2 9y ago
      Not AS vulnerable but in the near future when you search thru voice commands and hear results back, all those google ads that your eyes scan can be thrown out of window. Here is relevant read: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/27/alphabet-investors-voice-search-making-money-at-google-ceo-sundar-pichai.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/27/alphabet-investors-voice-sea...
empath75 9y ago
Yahoo was great for like the 2 years between when the web started becoming useful and when google figured out search. They never figured out what they were after the hand edited index of the internet stopped being its reason to exist.
smacktoward 9y ago
> “We didn’t want to call it a portal, because a portal is a door to somewhere else, and we wanted people to stay there,” says Shannon Brayton, a senior manager in Yahoo’s corporate communications department from 1998 to 2001. Of course the company that eventually killed them, Google, found its earliest success by explicitly rejecting this ethos. Google was a search engine, they didn't care if it sent you away; they wanted it to send you away, because that meant it was working. It meant you had found what you were looking for. A search engine's entire job is to send you away. But then came AdWords and the IPO, both of which applied pressure on Google to become something else, something other than a search engine. Something that herded eyeballs together, rather than pushing them out. Something that eventually became what Google ironically is today: a better Yahoo than Yahoo ever was.
- commandlinefan 9y ago
  > Google was a search engine, they didn't care if it sent you away; they wanted it to send you away ... only seems obvious in hindsight, though. I worked for a string of internet companies in the late 90's back when people were still trying to figure out what an internet company was supposed to be. The biggest task that they consistently put on me, the tech guy who actually understood what "internet" meant, was making sure that users didn't use too much of the company's internet, because internet was expensive. When I first heard of MySpace, I was floored - they're just letting people upload stuff to their servers? Like... whatever they want? As often as they want? They don't charge each individual user by the individual byte? This was heresy! (And then I checked to see if they were hiring...)
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - rasen58 9y ago
    So how was MySpace able to do that back then? Did they just have a lot of funding that they were able to use to give away all that free space?
- pmlnr 9y ago
  And with AMP, Google as well, now, wants you to stay.
georgehm 9y ago
no mention of Yahoo Pipes?
- onli 9y ago
  No, but the mainstream impact of that nice site was probably just too low.
ggm 9y ago
Partner was glued to yahoo as a landing page for years. I never understood why, suspect it was the familiarity of it.
whoisjuan 9y ago
Wow. I didn't know about Yahoo! Music. That was definitely a service ahead of its time. I can see why it failed in the early 2000s (less trust in internet transactions, slower bandwidth) but it's basically the same service that Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, etc, offer nowadays.
- fny 9y ago
  IMO, Yahoo music failed because you couldn't take it with you anywhere and because the music industry wasn't ready to part with their $10+ per album mindset. Did I love that service...
  - akhilcacharya 9y ago
    You could for a fee - you could transfer songs to an MP3 player with the appropriate DRM.
- pmlnr 9y ago
  Just like last.fm :(
- ahtu123 9y ago
  Early 2000's was the heyday of illegal music services though. Audiogalaxy being the best but things like Napster and Limewire and emule were just too tempting for any legal alternative to swoop in yet.
- johnvanommen 9y ago
  IIRC, that was an acquisition. I interviewed there, they were a block away from Real Network in Seattle, and mostly consisted of alumni from there. In 2004, Real Network was A Big Deal.
m0ngr31 9y ago
Couple of comments about Yahoo being dead or killed off... Yahoo is still around doing the exact same things it's been doing. It hasn't even changed it's name. Technically it's bigger now that it's merged with AOL.
onli 9y ago
The Google search comparisons in the article are strange. Google did not win the search engine war because it had integrated ads, I think it won because the search results were so much better. There might be some indirect connection - less revenue because of a different advertising model, leading to less investment - but I rather think this was just about the technology not being there. Which is maybe not that surprising when coming from curated links and suddenly fighting, well, Google.
- cpeterso 9y ago
  IIRC, Google was one of the first search engines to AND your search terms by default, returning relevant pages from long tail sites. Other search engines at the time would OR your search terms, returning irrelevant pages from popular sites. I think this simple difference in defaults had almost as big an impact as Google's PageRank/BackRub algorithm.
  - sixothree 9y ago
    To get an idea of where the search experience was when google came to market - they were the first ones to have the text cursor located in the search box. You didn't have to click the box before you started typing, your cursor was automatically placed in the correct place.
    - Retra 9y ago
      And most other search engines put ads on the main search page. Google just gave you a box. This was a big deal when you're on those old, slow connections. It was also less obtrusive and more classy.
  - dpark 9y ago
    Every search engine of Yahoo's era supported ANDing terms. It didn't help. The result you wanted was still swimming beneath 7 pages of trash. Commonly it wasn't even in the results because the AND was too restrictive. Backrub is what made Google so much better. Google also really focused on search and made numerous improvements, but the linchpin was backrub.
rm999 9y ago
I'm surprised that AOL isn't really discussed in this article. I always assumed Yahoo's ethos, as the one-stop shop on the internet ("We didn’t want to call it a portal, because a portal is a door to somewhere else, and we wanted people to stay there") came straight out of AOL's playbook. What I know for sure is that I, and a lot of other people, immediately felt comfortable with Yahoo when we first started using the internet because we were so used to AOL's vision of how you connect "online". I think the connection run strong - I'd go as far as saying that Yahoo and AOL failed for the same reason. To survive at their inflated valuations they had to be everything to everyone, which stretched their vision thin. Meanwhile, it was always impossible to do everything, so smaller, more agile players came in and etched away at their business models.
- jhayward 9y ago
  > To survive at their inflated valuations they had to be everything to everyone, which stretched their vision thin Your comment is spot on. It also handcuffed them to their established business model(s) and "properties", because they couldn't afford to take a revenue hit or self-cannibalize to transition to the next S-curve eating the world. Given that, demise is inevitable.
oldoverholt 9y ago
I still think the ideal search experience was the era when Yahoo! would search the Yahoo! Directory by default, and allowed you to switch over to "Web" results that were actually Google search results. It was a cool way to have a default search for "official" or more curated content in Directory (reminds me a little of DuckDuckGo marking a result as "Official Site"), and the option to search web content at large too for more specific or obscure stuff. RIP Yahoo! Directory.
pg_bot 9y ago
Yahoo was poorly managed for its entire existence. They tried to do everything and ended up doing nothing well. The products that they were best known for search, email, finance, sports all stagnated for years while their attention shifted towards the newest shiniest thing. They never seemed to ask the question, "Why do people use Yahoo in the first place?".
rossdavidh 9y ago
From Paul Graham, inside view: http://paulgraham.com/yahoo.html http://paulgraham.com/yahoo.html "What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the company. They were already very visible when I got there in 1998. Yahoo had two problems Google didn't: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company."
- lucas_membrane 9y ago
  >> easy money Some time around 1995-6, yahoo reported earnings $0.05/share above expectations after the markets closed, and the stock shot up more than $200.00 in after-hours trading. Can any company survive that?
netc 9y ago
Once I went to Stanford to attend Donald Knuth's Annual Christmas Lecture. During the talk he wanted to show some search query on google. What he did next was interesting. He typed yahoo.com in a browser's address bar and then searched for google on yahoo's search to reach to google!!
- itwy 9y ago
  Why and why it's interesting?
  - ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
    Because even the people who invented modern computing and have a complete understanding of how the internet works, are still vulnerable to the bad habits that dictate our ability to use the internet. I think what he is also saying is that Yahoo had a built in buffer, that they had to work really hard to fuck up. Because even Genius's turned to Yahoo to Google things for a long time. Also anytime a genius can't do a basic task it is "interesting". Viral sites like Buzzfeed love spreading stories about how Steven Hawking couldn't figure out how to use his Comcast remote control.
    - MaxBarraclough 9y ago
      > still vulnerable to the bad habits Doesn't it seem more likely it was a joke?
      - ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
        It totally could have been. But if I'm focused on giving a presentation, I've been known to subconsciously do some dumb things when on my computer, so it could have been him just not devoting any attention to what he was doing.
    - yiyus 9y ago
      I totally agree Knuth is a genius, but he does not look like an early adopter at all. He does not use email and I would not be surprised if he does not have a mobile phone (not even a non-smart one). I think that if I had seen him typing google.com in the yahoo search bar, I'd have just thought: of course.
irrational 9y ago
I remember back in 1995 getting on Yahoo one day and going through every single category and clicking every website link in the entire directory (I was in college and bored). I like to tell my kids that at one point it was possible to visit every singe website on the WWW ;-)
- deckard1 9y ago
  There was a brief period of time where visiting a link felt like a new adventure. We take the simplicity of a "link" for granted today, probably because most links are just clickbait now. Eventually links turned into time-consuming traps of "under construction" animations and icons and popup advertising hell. But even then, the Internet truly felt like the wild west.
  - ahtu123 9y ago
    I miss the diversity in web design back in the day. From blinking, colorful and seizure-inducing to very dark pages with little torch gifs. Weirdly enough every website now looks the same (ok maybe we have 3 archetypes of web design) even though the number of sites has grown exponentially for decades.
  - yiyus 9y ago
    I remember web rings. There were some nice rabbit holes to get lost.
- DrScump 9y ago
  I remember when I was first told that there was such a thing as a search engine, when they were new. And I thought, "how could any one, free site index every site on the WWW?" Every 1995 site... a tally of which was hardly statistical noise compared to today's numbers.
thinkingemote 9y ago
Yahoo Labs was innovative and inspiring. They seemed to make stuff that was useful, wasn't killed immediately and had an independent life. I don't think today's tech behemoths can approach where they were. Maybe it was just the frontier back then...
prostoalex 9y ago
> Yahoo Briefcase, for instance, did cloud storage long before the likes of Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive. Ha. Yahoo! had an internal idea portal and a review team. Expanding Y! Briefcase storage was the first thing I submitted to that portal upon joining the company in 2005 (I am sure I wasn't the first to think of it, but there was no way to see previously submitted stuff). The response from the ideas counsel was that Briefcase at the time was primarily used to illegally share music/video, and expanding personal storage would only exacerbate bad behavior. It would be in company's interest to sunset the service, not expand it.
- mooreds 9y ago
  Has there ever been a time where a lawyer helped promote a new product idea? Seems like they are in the business of saying (kinda like accountants). This is a useful protective function, but can definitely cause stasis. Not sure how to balance it.
  - prostoalex 9y ago
    Oops, I meant to type "council". It was a collective body from what I gathered.
  - tjalfi 9y ago
    Two of the four founders of Intellectual Ventures were attorneys[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures
- allenz 9y ago
  That was probably the correct decision in 2005. Most file-sharing sites have gone out of business. The successful ones have distinguishing features. Box is still a B2B company, Drive benefits from synergy with the entire G Suite, and Dropbox's primary feature is sync.
JAFTEM 9y ago
GeoCities in the early 2000's is where I first created and built something with a computer and the Internet and the experience started the journey towards becoming a software developer. I still remember using a hit counter to track how many people visited my cartoon fan-site (I was 10, 11 years old) and getting excited over 20 visitors.
esfandia 9y ago
With every re-design, their services get worse. Yahoo Sports used to have easy access to boxscores and game recaps. My Yahoo's RSS content fetching has been broken for a while. Problem is, there are no real alternatives either.
reaperducer 9y ago
While Yahoo! is mostly a memory in the U.S., it lives on (or at least its brand does) very strongly in Japan. You see Yahoo! Japan logos everywhere in big cities. Yahoo! Auctions is just about the only game there, sending fleaBay to the woodshed.
- wyclif 9y ago
  Also in the Philippines! I can't begin to tell you how many Filipinos I know who, to this very day, have @yahoo.com email accounts and still use Yahoo! Messenger.
dalbasal 9y ago
A huge part of what yahoo were was the dotcom bubble. They're like a personification (firmification?). People could see the internet was a big deal. People could see that oligopolies would be important. They assumed early movers would own the market. Investors and startups were right about a lot of things, but it was enough to be wrong about one or two things... Yahoo did better than most. No one knew how long it would take for the internet to "get there," and the implications for early movers. In retrospect, I think this was knowable, but everyone made this mistake. More importantly, no one knew what businesses would be valuable online. Servers would become amazon's main moneymaker. They achieved (along with others) the goal of becoming a retailer on a scale not yet seen then, but servers are a better business. Go figure. Search, holiday rentals & distinct categories of social networking became monopolies, and great businesses. The Encyclopedia became better than anyone imagined, but not a business. Retail margins never improved. Free online video never became a business. Online news is barely a business. Email is not a business. ebay would stay exactly the same. Go figure. Stress on the news point. News was the centrepiece business of almost any other media sector, print, tv, radio, teletex... online, it's a dud. All this stuff had to be figured out. Yahoo started from logical premises. You couldn't find anything online, so they made a directory. There wasn't much online, so they published stuff for people to read. They surveyed the two, saw more potential in the latter. Huge mistake. It just wasn't obvious at the time. The better the directory/search got, the less time people spent there. People spent time looking at news and stocks and stuff. ...That's where the ad money will be, like TV. It was not ilogical, it was just not true. Who knew that search advertising would be a $100bn blue chip business and "content advertising" would be mostly penis enlargment and diet tricks? Surely yahoo finance would be a premium ad seller? no? really? search & facebook, the online tabloid? A lot of stuff still doesn't make sense. Youtube. Why isn't youtube a serious business? People watch 1bn hours of youtube per day! TV ads are a thing. A big deal, in fact. They don't pay anything for content. Google already has a massive ad business. For the life of me... youtube should be as bigger business than facebook.. certainly bigger than netflix. Incidentally, almost every news site tries to force/trick me into watching videos (not even always ads). ...hints at how bad a business news is, that they want a sliver of what youtube have so desperately. TLDR: Yahoo had to guess a lot of future, and place bets. It turned out that these bets could be placed 5-10 years later, with much better chances of being right and without missing out on much. Hard gig Yahoo.
strictnein 9y ago
It's almost exactly 10 years since Yahoo rejected Microsoft's acquisition offer. Even at the time it was pretty clear they should have accepted it, but it seems like Yang was too proud. Microsoft offered $45 Billion(!) for Yahoo. https://www.thestreet.com/story/13655197/1/what-would-have-happened-if-microsoft-had-bought-yahoo-in-2008.html https://www.thestreet.com/story/13655197/1/what-would-have-h...
- mixmastamyk 9y ago
  Not to mention it would probably have hastened MS’ demise/reinvention years earlier.
- phonon 9y ago
  Altaba (Yahoo!'s Alibaba assets) is worth $68 Billion[1], so no, they probably did the right thing. [1]https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AABA/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AABA/
  - strictnein 9y ago
    I mean, we're comparing 2008 money to 2018. If you put $45 billion in the stock market in 2008 when this offer was rejected it'd be worth ~$90 billion now. If they were given MS stock as part of the deal, that $45 billion would be worth around $130 billion. So, still probably a bad idea to reject the offer.
tabtab 9y ago
Great quote from Paul Graham on Yahoo's demise: Hacker culture often seems kind of irresponsible. That's why people proposing to destroy it [replacing it with "suit" culture] use phrases like "adult supervision." That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example.
darrenf 9y ago
I think my biggest takeaway from this article is how few names I recognise in it, apart from all the CEOs, despite working for Yahoo! from 1999 to 2011. Mind you, in Europe I rarely felt particularly connected to what was going in in Sunnyvale. Still proud to have worked on the official FIFA world cup website, among other things. The Google misstep (as it was considered by many) hurt for a while. The high traffic mailing list for unmoderated developer chat eventually begat a "what would Google do?" offshoot because Gmail this, search that, page rank the other were dominating too many threads.
Animats 9y ago
The article doesn't even mention the whole Yahoo-Alibaba fiasco.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

226 points by ohjeez 9y ago

jtth 9y ago

What glory? All these points were acquisitions. Everything this article celebrates were destroyed by Yahoo. The only thing they ever did well was build a portal.

djsumdog 9y ago
A lot of times they'd buy up companies just for the developers and then kill the product, like with Astrid Tasks (at least Microsoft didn't kill Wunderlist after acquiring it). I'm curious the number of devs that stayed at Yahoo past a year from these buyouts versus those who were like 'fuck this' and started looking for new work.
Torwald 9y ago
The free email account at Yahoo was a nice one too. The web client was really nicely done.
BlueAThrow 9y ago
I worked for AOL, who Verizon recently merged with Yahoo . It was inevitable they destroyed the startups . Yahoo processes made us look lean in comparison, and we were another old web 1.0 company . The first thing they make you do is port to their tech stack and so much time is spent on that process and approvals from central teams that it's a wonder anything gets done . They've got their own package manager, own internal ec2 clone, own build system, own Linux distro, own deploy system, and if any of those things were good it might make sense, but they're mid-2000s tech in quality . Flickr disappeared for a crucial year post merger, and apparently they were porting to Yahoo's internal account system: https://gizmodo.com/5910223/how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost-the-internet https://gizmodo.com/5910223/how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost... . At least that produced some user facing unification compared to some of the tasks we had . The attitude has not improved since .
- praneshp 9y ago
  > , own internal ec2 clone, Are you talking about openstack/openhouse, or something else?
- cmrdporcupine 9y ago
  Honestly, it's no different anywhere. BigCorp, no matter the quality, will acquire in the hopes of getting the 'special sauce' that comes with the startup but then proceeds to either force a rewrite, or poach all the people off, kill the product, or some other means of demotivating all people involved.
- henrikschroder 9y ago
  > but they're mid-2000s tech in quality . This was the most disappointing part of being acquired. It was quite a wake-up call to realize that the culture inside Yahoo actually believed that their tech stack was good and competitive and that they were as innovative as Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Amazon. Nope. Yahoo obviously had a bunch of really clever people working there up until the year 2000, and they had to build a lot of things that didn't exist back then, because they were the first internet behemoth. But then all of those really clever people quit, and the company was left trying to steward the existing systems, while not having enough brainpower to create successor systems. So they were stuck, and a myopic "we're hot shit!" culture developed. Meanwhile, the rest of the world went on, and "Yahoo scale" just aren't very impressive numbers anymore, and their 2000's tech stacks are just horribly overly complex solutions.
- empath75 9y ago
  I worked at aol and if yahoo’s stuff was worse I can’t imagine how bad it was.
- zillow90 9y ago
  Are you in dialup internet services group? I heard AOL no longer sending dialer installer floppies.
- notacoward 9y ago
  > They've got their own package manager, own internal ec2 clone, own build system, own Linux distro, own deploy system This exactly describes the current cadre of internet giants as well, and it does seem nuts, but it's important to realize why this happens. For one thing, these systems were often developed and made to run at scale well before their better known brethren appeared. Sometimes those better known brethren eventually surpass the internal tools. Sometimes they never do. > The first thing they make you do is port to their tech stack There's no simple answer to whether this is a good idea. Switching costs are a real thing. Even if what you're switching to is better, that superiority has to outweigh the cost of the transition itself. There's a cost to the parent company switching, and there's a cost to the acquiree switching. There's also a cost of running a bazillion different software stacks on ten kinds of hardware and operating systems, as I know AOL did in those days. Maybe that's part of the reason they stopped being a viable standalone company. The most successful post-acquisition tech merges I've seen have been very deliberate about the costs and benefits of changing each part, not adopting blanket "always" or "never" rules.
pjc50 9y ago
The title is a parody of "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Helen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Helen

jcloud_dev 9y ago

Impressive how consistently wrong were all the decisions on acquisitions and takeovers.

heedlessly2 9y ago

good job jerry yang

api 9y ago

Yahoo died because it forgot it was a technology company and stopped innovating. I've also heard that it developed an internal culture dominated by non-technical sales types who didn't understand how to manage their acquisitions or run a technology business and who de-valued those parts of the business. Didn't take long for them to get left in the dust by more innovative rivals.

velodrome 9y ago

Yahoo could not decide whether it was a technology company or media company...

StevePerkins 9y ago
The same could be said for most current tech titans. Some are just at different points along their lifecycle than others.
- cmrdporcupine 9y ago
  Well, really, Google deliberately kept out of content provision for years in a way that Yahoo didn't. Google was only interested in being the gateway or the platform, not the publisher. That seems to have worked for them.
azinman2 9y ago
I could say the same about Facebook today.

overcast 9y ago

Only thing I ever found useful(and still do) is Yahoo Finance.

azinman2 9y ago
Guessing you’re young / missed the beginning of the net, because that’s when yahoo was king.
- code_duck 9y ago
  Even back in the day, I preferred Altavista. I have never perceived yahoo or any of their products as good, or used any regularly, other than a few that were acquired like Flickr.
  - bluGill 9y ago
    yahoo was before Altavista. When they started a table of contents of the web it was great - back when the web was small enough that you could make a table of contents (at the time gopher was bigger than the web and growing faster, and gopher was mostly accessed via the table of contents). When Altavista came yahoo's index was better because instead of having to figure out the right search terms you could navigate a logical table of contents quickly. Then the web exploded (gopher was already all but dead) and it wasn't possible for yahoo to keep up, at which point search became the only hope. If Altavista hadn't quit updating their index for several months, they could have killed google just by keeping their index up to date and continuously refining their search algorithm. Of course this last is speculation but it is reasonable, google wasn't that much better.
    - mturmon 9y ago
      Well, Yahoo was founded in March 1995 and Altavista was opened in December 1995, which I think is generally the same time period. My perception as a technical user at the time is different than yours -- Altavista was much more influential to me than the curated table of contents that Yahoo had.
    - 9y ago

russellbeattie 9y ago

IT's amazing that something so simple as a not having a clear vision/mission could take down a successful company but that's the essentially what happened at Yahoo! When I worked there in 2004 it was just confused, chasing competitors and ideas, never deciding on what it wanted to be when it grew up. I left a year or so later and from what I saw it never figured itself out. I always wanted the company to focus on a mission about being "useful" - like the digital WD-40/duck tape of your life. Finance, news, fantasy-sports, email, messenger, groups, My Yahoo!, Delicious, Flickr... They're all useful. They could have continued to happily and profitably offer all of these services - and expanded to dozens more - under the mantra of being useful to our every day lives, but Yahoo! was never content with that. They wanted to be eBay, or Google, or Facebook, or YouTube or whoever else was a big player at the time, instead of focusing on the customer loyalty they had already generated. Having that clear core vision/mission seems like a small thing, but not having one crippled Yahoo! and caused infighting, turnover and confusion that eventually killed it. (Oh, and also Mayer was an idiot.)

mmagin 9y ago
It's kind of amazing it took so long for it to kill them.
paulryanrogers 9y ago
Google seems to be falling into a similar pattern with it's many different attempts at chat apps
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  Google's income stream from advertising is not as vulnerable as Yahoo's home page for the internet model as far as I know.
  - joering2 9y ago
    Not AS vulnerable but in the near future when you search thru voice commands and hear results back, all those google ads that your eyes scan can be thrown out of window. Here is relevant read: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/27/alphabet-investors-voice-search-making-money-at-google-ceo-sundar-pichai.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/27/alphabet-investors-voice-sea...

empath75 9y ago

Yahoo was great for like the 2 years between when the web started becoming useful and when google figured out search. They never figured out what they were after the hand edited index of the internet stopped being its reason to exist.

smacktoward 9y ago

> “We didn’t want to call it a portal, because a portal is a door to somewhere else, and we wanted people to stay there,” says Shannon Brayton, a senior manager in Yahoo’s corporate communications department from 1998 to 2001. Of course the company that eventually killed them, Google, found its earliest success by explicitly rejecting this ethos. Google was a search engine, they didn't care if it sent you away; they wanted it to send you away, because that meant it was working. It meant you had found what you were looking for. A search engine's entire job is to send you away. But then came AdWords and the IPO, both of which applied pressure on Google to become something else, something other than a search engine. Something that herded eyeballs together, rather than pushing them out. Something that eventually became what Google ironically is today: a better Yahoo than Yahoo ever was.

commandlinefan 9y ago
> Google was a search engine, they didn't care if it sent you away; they wanted it to send you away ... only seems obvious in hindsight, though. I worked for a string of internet companies in the late 90's back when people were still trying to figure out what an internet company was supposed to be. The biggest task that they consistently put on me, the tech guy who actually understood what "internet" meant, was making sure that users didn't use too much of the company's internet, because internet was expensive. When I first heard of MySpace, I was floored - they're just letting people upload stuff to their servers? Like... whatever they want? As often as they want? They don't charge each individual user by the individual byte? This was heresy! (And then I checked to see if they were hiring...)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- rasen58 9y ago
  So how was MySpace able to do that back then? Did they just have a lot of funding that they were able to use to give away all that free space?
pmlnr 9y ago
And with AMP, Google as well, now, wants you to stay.

georgehm 9y ago

no mention of Yahoo Pipes?

onli 9y ago
No, but the mainstream impact of that nice site was probably just too low.

ggm 9y ago

Partner was glued to yahoo as a landing page for years. I never understood why, suspect it was the familiarity of it.

whoisjuan 9y ago

Wow. I didn't know about Yahoo! Music. That was definitely a service ahead of its time. I can see why it failed in the early 2000s (less trust in internet transactions, slower bandwidth) but it's basically the same service that Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, etc, offer nowadays.

fny 9y ago
IMO, Yahoo music failed because you couldn't take it with you anywhere and because the music industry wasn't ready to part with their $10+ per album mindset. Did I love that service...
- akhilcacharya 9y ago
  You could for a fee - you could transfer songs to an MP3 player with the appropriate DRM.
pmlnr 9y ago
Just like last.fm :(
ahtu123 9y ago
Early 2000's was the heyday of illegal music services though. Audiogalaxy being the best but things like Napster and Limewire and emule were just too tempting for any legal alternative to swoop in yet.
johnvanommen 9y ago
IIRC, that was an acquisition. I interviewed there, they were a block away from Real Network in Seattle, and mostly consisted of alumni from there. In 2004, Real Network was A Big Deal.

m0ngr31 9y ago

Couple of comments about Yahoo being dead or killed off... Yahoo is still around doing the exact same things it's been doing. It hasn't even changed it's name. Technically it's bigger now that it's merged with AOL.

onli 9y ago

The Google search comparisons in the article are strange. Google did not win the search engine war because it had integrated ads, I think it won because the search results were so much better. There might be some indirect connection - less revenue because of a different advertising model, leading to less investment - but I rather think this was just about the technology not being there. Which is maybe not that surprising when coming from curated links and suddenly fighting, well, Google.

cpeterso 9y ago
IIRC, Google was one of the first search engines to AND your search terms by default, returning relevant pages from long tail sites. Other search engines at the time would OR your search terms, returning irrelevant pages from popular sites. I think this simple difference in defaults had almost as big an impact as Google's PageRank/BackRub algorithm.
- sixothree 9y ago
  To get an idea of where the search experience was when google came to market - they were the first ones to have the text cursor located in the search box. You didn't have to click the box before you started typing, your cursor was automatically placed in the correct place.
  - Retra 9y ago
    And most other search engines put ads on the main search page. Google just gave you a box. This was a big deal when you're on those old, slow connections. It was also less obtrusive and more classy.
- dpark 9y ago
  Every search engine of Yahoo's era supported ANDing terms. It didn't help. The result you wanted was still swimming beneath 7 pages of trash. Commonly it wasn't even in the results because the AND was too restrictive. Backrub is what made Google so much better. Google also really focused on search and made numerous improvements, but the linchpin was backrub.

rm999 9y ago

I'm surprised that AOL isn't really discussed in this article. I always assumed Yahoo's ethos, as the one-stop shop on the internet ("We didn’t want to call it a portal, because a portal is a door to somewhere else, and we wanted people to stay there") came straight out of AOL's playbook. What I know for sure is that I, and a lot of other people, immediately felt comfortable with Yahoo when we first started using the internet because we were so used to AOL's vision of how you connect "online". I think the connection run strong - I'd go as far as saying that Yahoo and AOL failed for the same reason. To survive at their inflated valuations they had to be everything to everyone, which stretched their vision thin. Meanwhile, it was always impossible to do everything, so smaller, more agile players came in and etched away at their business models.

jhayward 9y ago
> To survive at their inflated valuations they had to be everything to everyone, which stretched their vision thin Your comment is spot on. It also handcuffed them to their established business model(s) and "properties", because they couldn't afford to take a revenue hit or self-cannibalize to transition to the next S-curve eating the world. Given that, demise is inevitable.

oldoverholt 9y ago

I still think the ideal search experience was the era when Yahoo! would search the Yahoo! Directory by default, and allowed you to switch over to "Web" results that were actually Google search results. It was a cool way to have a default search for "official" or more curated content in Directory (reminds me a little of DuckDuckGo marking a result as "Official Site"), and the option to search web content at large too for more specific or obscure stuff. RIP Yahoo! Directory.

pg_bot 9y ago

Yahoo was poorly managed for its entire existence. They tried to do everything and ended up doing nothing well. The products that they were best known for search, email, finance, sports all stagnated for years while their attention shifted towards the newest shiniest thing. They never seemed to ask the question, "Why do people use Yahoo in the first place?".

rossdavidh 9y ago

From Paul Graham, inside view: http://paulgraham.com/yahoo.html http://paulgraham.com/yahoo.html "What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the company. They were already very visible when I got there in 1998. Yahoo had two problems Google didn't: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company."

lucas_membrane 9y ago
>> easy money Some time around 1995-6, yahoo reported earnings $0.05/share above expectations after the markets closed, and the stock shot up more than $200.00 in after-hours trading. Can any company survive that?

netc 9y ago

Once I went to Stanford to attend Donald Knuth's Annual Christmas Lecture. During the talk he wanted to show some search query on google. What he did next was interesting. He typed yahoo.com in a browser's address bar and then searched for google on yahoo's search to reach to google!!

itwy 9y ago
Why and why it's interesting?
- ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
  Because even the people who invented modern computing and have a complete understanding of how the internet works, are still vulnerable to the bad habits that dictate our ability to use the internet. I think what he is also saying is that Yahoo had a built in buffer, that they had to work really hard to fuck up. Because even Genius's turned to Yahoo to Google things for a long time. Also anytime a genius can't do a basic task it is "interesting". Viral sites like Buzzfeed love spreading stories about how Steven Hawking couldn't figure out how to use his Comcast remote control.
  - MaxBarraclough 9y ago
    > still vulnerable to the bad habits Doesn't it seem more likely it was a joke?
    - ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
      It totally could have been. But if I'm focused on giving a presentation, I've been known to subconsciously do some dumb things when on my computer, so it could have been him just not devoting any attention to what he was doing.
  - yiyus 9y ago
    I totally agree Knuth is a genius, but he does not look like an early adopter at all. He does not use email and I would not be surprised if he does not have a mobile phone (not even a non-smart one). I think that if I had seen him typing google.com in the yahoo search bar, I'd have just thought: of course.

irrational 9y ago

I remember back in 1995 getting on Yahoo one day and going through every single category and clicking every website link in the entire directory (I was in college and bored). I like to tell my kids that at one point it was possible to visit every singe website on the WWW ;-)

deckard1 9y ago
There was a brief period of time where visiting a link felt like a new adventure. We take the simplicity of a "link" for granted today, probably because most links are just clickbait now. Eventually links turned into time-consuming traps of "under construction" animations and icons and popup advertising hell. But even then, the Internet truly felt like the wild west.
- ahtu123 9y ago
  I miss the diversity in web design back in the day. From blinking, colorful and seizure-inducing to very dark pages with little torch gifs. Weirdly enough every website now looks the same (ok maybe we have 3 archetypes of web design) even though the number of sites has grown exponentially for decades.
- yiyus 9y ago
  I remember web rings. There were some nice rabbit holes to get lost.
DrScump 9y ago
I remember when I was first told that there was such a thing as a search engine, when they were new. And I thought, "how could any one, free site index every site on the WWW?" Every 1995 site... a tally of which was hardly statistical noise compared to today's numbers.

thinkingemote 9y ago

Yahoo Labs was innovative and inspiring. They seemed to make stuff that was useful, wasn't killed immediately and had an independent life. I don't think today's tech behemoths can approach where they were. Maybe it was just the frontier back then...

prostoalex 9y ago

> Yahoo Briefcase, for instance, did cloud storage long before the likes of Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive. Ha. Yahoo! had an internal idea portal and a review team. Expanding Y! Briefcase storage was the first thing I submitted to that portal upon joining the company in 2005 (I am sure I wasn't the first to think of it, but there was no way to see previously submitted stuff). The response from the ideas counsel was that Briefcase at the time was primarily used to illegally share music/video, and expanding personal storage would only exacerbate bad behavior. It would be in company's interest to sunset the service, not expand it.

mooreds 9y ago
Has there ever been a time where a lawyer helped promote a new product idea? Seems like they are in the business of saying (kinda like accountants). This is a useful protective function, but can definitely cause stasis. Not sure how to balance it.
- prostoalex 9y ago
  Oops, I meant to type "council". It was a collective body from what I gathered.
- tjalfi 9y ago
  Two of the four founders of Intellectual Ventures were attorneys[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures
allenz 9y ago
That was probably the correct decision in 2005. Most file-sharing sites have gone out of business. The successful ones have distinguishing features. Box is still a B2B company, Drive benefits from synergy with the entire G Suite, and Dropbox's primary feature is sync.

JAFTEM 9y ago

GeoCities in the early 2000's is where I first created and built something with a computer and the Internet and the experience started the journey towards becoming a software developer. I still remember using a hit counter to track how many people visited my cartoon fan-site (I was 10, 11 years old) and getting excited over 20 visitors.

esfandia 9y ago

With every re-design, their services get worse. Yahoo Sports used to have easy access to boxscores and game recaps. My Yahoo's RSS content fetching has been broken for a while. Problem is, there are no real alternatives either.

reaperducer 9y ago

While Yahoo! is mostly a memory in the U.S., it lives on (or at least its brand does) very strongly in Japan. You see Yahoo! Japan logos everywhere in big cities. Yahoo! Auctions is just about the only game there, sending fleaBay to the woodshed.

wyclif 9y ago
Also in the Philippines! I can't begin to tell you how many Filipinos I know who, to this very day, have @yahoo.com email accounts and still use Yahoo! Messenger.

dalbasal 9y ago

A huge part of what yahoo were was the dotcom bubble. They're like a personification (firmification?). People could see the internet was a big deal. People could see that oligopolies would be important. They assumed early movers would own the market. Investors and startups were right about a lot of things, but it was enough to be wrong about one or two things... Yahoo did better than most. No one knew how long it would take for the internet to "get there," and the implications for early movers. In retrospect, I think this was knowable, but everyone made this mistake. More importantly, no one knew what businesses would be valuable online. Servers would become amazon's main moneymaker. They achieved (along with others) the goal of becoming a retailer on a scale not yet seen then, but servers are a better business. Go figure. Search, holiday rentals & distinct categories of social networking became monopolies, and great businesses. The Encyclopedia became better than anyone imagined, but not a business. Retail margins never improved. Free online video never became a business. Online news is barely a business. Email is not a business. ebay would stay exactly the same. Go figure. Stress on the news point. News was the centrepiece business of almost any other media sector, print, tv, radio, teletex... online, it's a dud. All this stuff had to be figured out. Yahoo started from logical premises. You couldn't find anything online, so they made a directory. There wasn't much online, so they published stuff for people to read. They surveyed the two, saw more potential in the latter. Huge mistake. It just wasn't obvious at the time. The better the directory/search got, the less time people spent there. People spent time looking at news and stocks and stuff. ...That's where the ad money will be, like TV. It was not ilogical, it was just not true. Who knew that search advertising would be a $100bn blue chip business and "content advertising" would be mostly penis enlargment and diet tricks? Surely yahoo finance would be a premium ad seller? no? really? search & facebook, the online tabloid? A lot of stuff still doesn't make sense. Youtube. Why isn't youtube a serious business? People watch 1bn hours of youtube per day! TV ads are a thing. A big deal, in fact. They don't pay anything for content. Google already has a massive ad business. For the life of me... youtube should be as bigger business than facebook.. certainly bigger than netflix. Incidentally, almost every news site tries to force/trick me into watching videos (not even always ads). ...hints at how bad a business news is, that they want a sliver of what youtube have so desperately. TLDR: Yahoo had to guess a lot of future, and place bets. It turned out that these bets could be placed 5-10 years later, with much better chances of being right and without missing out on much. Hard gig Yahoo.

strictnein 9y ago

It's almost exactly 10 years since Yahoo rejected Microsoft's acquisition offer. Even at the time it was pretty clear they should have accepted it, but it seems like Yang was too proud. Microsoft offered $45 Billion(!) for Yahoo. https://www.thestreet.com/story/13655197/1/what-would-have-happened-if-microsoft-had-bought-yahoo-in-2008.html https://www.thestreet.com/story/13655197/1/what-would-have-h...

mixmastamyk 9y ago
Not to mention it would probably have hastened MS’ demise/reinvention years earlier.
phonon 9y ago
Altaba (Yahoo!'s Alibaba assets) is worth $68 Billion[1], so no, they probably did the right thing. [1]https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AABA/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AABA/
- strictnein 9y ago
  I mean, we're comparing 2008 money to 2018. If you put $45 billion in the stock market in 2008 when this offer was rejected it'd be worth ~$90 billion now. If they were given MS stock as part of the deal, that $45 billion would be worth around $130 billion. So, still probably a bad idea to reject the offer.

tabtab 9y ago

Great quote from Paul Graham on Yahoo's demise: Hacker culture often seems kind of irresponsible. That's why people proposing to destroy it [replacing it with "suit" culture] use phrases like "adult supervision." That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example.

darrenf 9y ago

I think my biggest takeaway from this article is how few names I recognise in it, apart from all the CEOs, despite working for Yahoo! from 1999 to 2011. Mind you, in Europe I rarely felt particularly connected to what was going in in Sunnyvale. Still proud to have worked on the official FIFA world cup website, among other things. The Google misstep (as it was considered by many) hurt for a while. The high traffic mailing list for unmoderated developer chat eventually begat a "what would Google do?" offshoot because Gmail this, search that, page rank the other were dominating too many threads.

Animats 9y ago

The article doesn't even mention the whole Yahoo-Alibaba fiasco.

deleted 9y ago

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