14 ms·
This seems implausible precisely because it’s the crowded view. But can anyone recall a time that the crowd correctly predicted the ascent of an unpopular produ
by dkrich 8y ago
This seems implausible precisely because it’s the crowded view. But can anyone recall a time that the crowd correctly predicted the ascent of an unpopular product or the descent of a popular one? I’m old enough to remember Yahoo’s rise and fall. There was a time people thought Zuckerberg was a greedy fool for turning down a $1 billion bid from Yahoo. Oh yeah did we forget about that?
Yahoo failed because they were out-innovated. They weren’t the only ones. Lots of highly successful search engines got their lunch eaten by Google. Yahoo also suffered from a lack of leadership and some very poorly conceived acquisitions.
I don’t see any of that with Facebook. In fact it’s the opposite- people are uneasy with how effectively they’ve acquired users and their data and monetized it.
Further, they’ve pretty much only made incredibly savvy acquisitions and managed their integration into the Facebook ecosystem masterfully. Instagram not only exists today but has quickly become arguably the most valuable property. What about Tumblr? Flickr?
Say what you will about the ethics of the company but Facebook has demonstrated they have vision and the ability to execute and adapt. Yahoo didn’t. Most companies don’t. They have their existing business and customers and exist as long as the winds don’t change.
- mrtksn 8y ago>This seems implausible precisely because it’s the crowded view I don't think that a company's success is based on the views of the outsiders. This is like picking B instead of C in a multiple choice test because there were to many questions with the answer C.
- nolok 8y ago> Yahoo failed because they were out-innovated The worst part is that Yahoo innovated a lot ... In incubators, side projects, etc ... But they failed to bring their innovations to their main products, or to turn their side things into full blown products. They had no plan, neither overall or per product. Take emails for exemple, for the longest time (and still now, although not as dominating) THE key to user identity on the internet. Google had a plan to leverage their Gmail userbase and integrated it, Microsoft took its time but they ultimately had a plan to leverage their hotmail userbase, but Yahoo sat on yahoo mails (one of the "big three" of emails basically) for the longest time and did ... Nothing. Same with flickr, they had people who loved the platform and begged them to take their money and move the product forward as a paid product and instead they let it rot for years. Lots of yahoo properties are like that. It's not that they tried something crazy and it failed, it's not that they got beat by a new comer, they just let their stuff die on their own. Pictures is now even more relevant than ever, and Yahoo should have been at the forefront and yet they let themselves be sidelined by doing nothing. The best non-yahoo similarity I can find is what Google is doing with Blogger.
- isolli 8y agoRequired reading on Flickr: https://gizmodo.com/5910223/how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost-the-internet https://gizmodo.com/5910223/how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost...
- lowercased 8y ago>They had no plan, neither overall or per product. I seem to remember some leadership there being adamant that they're weren't a tech or internet company, but a 'media' company. I can't remember which one (or ones?) but this embrace of hollywood/media vs technology seems to have been a key factor in their perpetual slide.
- adventured 8y agoThat was the big premise during the Terry Semel years. He was a high level executive with Warner Brothers for 25 years. They had no idea what they were doing or what being a media company in the Internet age meant. They flailed about for a decade with confusing ideas of what their strategy and end goal was. How did they go about pretending to be a media company for so many years, while watching others dominate streaming music and video? Incompetent leadership. How did they miss the numerous opportunities to acquire a real Internet media business like Netflix, for relatively cheap? They could have picked it up for most of 2007-2013 for $2b to $4b (early 2007 being when they launched their streaming service).
- app4soft 8y ago> Yahoo failed because they were out-innovated. They weren’t the only ones. Lots of highly successful search engines got their lunch eaten by Google. Yahoo! failed on email issues, not on search engine issues.
- jeremyjh 8y agoA lot of people went to Yahoo to search pre-Google. I think they were always "powered by Altavista", but they still got a lot of traffic for search.
- sizzle 8y agoWho owned Ask Jeeves?
- dkrich 8y agoGoogle still makes most of its money from search based ads. That pesky part about making a living and so on.
- pier25 8y ago> Yahoo failed because they were out-innovated Their most popular property ended up being Flickr, and they let it rot when smartphones and apps started being popular 10 years ago. Instead pro users fled to 500px and other communities, and social users wen to Instagram.
- sodosopa 8y agoYahoo! didn't build Flickr. Flickr came from Game Neverending. It was an in-game feature and it did so well, the game was never released. That came from Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield's team and their innovative work at Ludicorp. It was purchased and then became a squandered opportunity by Yahoo!
- dpcx 8y agoI don't think GP was suggesting that Yahoo built Flickr. They said it was Yahoo's most popular property. Which, outside of Mail, is probably a completely true statement. And they absolutely let it stagnate. The apps that were available for phones (once there were apps) were often pretty terrible, from my recollection.
- pier25 8y agoNever said they built it. But at its peak (I'd say around 2006-2010) it was owned by Yahoo.
- dirkgently 8y agoThanks for the history lesson. But OP never suggested that Yahoo built it.
- geggam 8y ago1998 Yahoo! turned down a 1 million dollar offer to buy Google.
- rchaud 8y agoThink that's bad? 10 years later, they turned down a $40bn acquisition offer from Microsoft.
- mtgx 8y ago> There was a time people thought Zuckerberg was a greedy fool Are you implying that's no longer true?
- dagw 8y agoI don't think many people see Zuckerberg as a fool.
- hodder 8y agoBlockbuster's demise was fairly widely predicted - at least among the tech crowd.
- dkrich 8y agoNot at the height of its popularity
- AJ007 8y agoAdding to other snarky comments about The Economist here, if it is published in The Economist it probably is the crowded view. I read the magazine for years and I'm not sure if I gained much unique insight about anything. Certainly Facebook is not Yahoo. I think you are right, Facebook is almost exactly the opposite of Yahoo in every way, from the founder sticking around to how acquisitions were picked and managed. I don't particularly like Facebook or agree with it. I prefer the communication platforms on the internet looked more like the internet, decentralized. Unfortunately for both Facebook's proponents and critics we are now in a negative news cycle echo chamber.
- seibelj 8y agoThey have accurate, high quality reporting on a wide variety of subjects. You are lying if you read the economist cover-to-cover every week and you don’t learn one “unique” piece of information, unless you are regularly keeping track of every country in Asia, Africa, etc. If something is in The Economist, is isn’t breaking news, and it’s more like an assessment of a newsworthy situation from the neoliberal viewpoint. I find it very interesting compared to other news sources, definitely worthy of my subscription.
- chiefalchemist 8y ago> "In fact it’s the opposite- people are uneasy with how effectively they’ve acquired users and their data and monetized it." The people I know who uneasy are not so much concerned with the fact that FB has done this; but how. Phrases that come up are: reckless, unethical, lack of transparency, immaturity, etc.
- elliekelly 8y ago> Facebook has demonstrated they have vision and the ability to execute and adapt. I'm a former attorney who worked in the investment industry and one of the shitty things I had to do when I first got out of law school was review footnotes on marketing material. In that industry there is one footnote that is basically the gospel: "Past performance not indicative of future results." Has Facebook demonstrated their vision and ability to adapt? Absolutely. So did Kodak, Sears, and Apple. Though Apple managed a turn-around they certainly had a point where they very likely would have gone the way of Sears until they brought Jobs back. Prior ability to innovate and execute means nothing. The important thing is continuing innovation. What the company is doing _right now_ is orders of magnitude more important than the longest track record of success. If anything, I think innovation becomes more difficult the bigger a company gets and the higher customer and investor expectations get.
- cronix 8y ago> Though Apple managed a turn-around they certainly had a point where they very likely would have gone the way of Sears until they brought Jobs back. The $150M investment Microsoft gave Apple had a lot to do with saving Apple, as well. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/29/steve-jobs-and-bill-gates-what-happened-when-microsoft-saved-apple.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/29/steve-jobs-and-bill-gates-wh...
- pascalxus 8y agoNot all businesses need to innovate or die. Just look at craigslist. Due to the nature of a 2 sided marketplace and the catch-22 challenge of acquiring a sufficient userbase, other competitors that innovated weren't able to compete.
- grey-area 8y agoI agree they’ve made savvy acquisitions, mostly in stock, which boosted their perceived value. Facebook are really vulnerable - they rely on trust from advertisers and clients, and have one stream of income - advertising. This will be very vulnerable in a downturn (which incidentally is what destroyed yahoo). Say what you will about the ethics of the company but Thanks. They have always been entirely lacking in ethics, from they trust me, to zynga, to fake ad metrics, to illegal Russian ads, to Soros smears. This makes it hard for anyone to trust them.