6 ms·

> 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

by 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 ago
Required 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 ago
  That 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).
  - abavuki 8y ago
    Wouldn't Netflix become another name on the list of failed acquisitions, like Flickr?
    - rustcharm 8y ago
      That's what I believe, too. If Yahoo had acquired Netflix, or Facebook, they wouldn't have succeeded either.
  - kbutler 8y ago
    I think nobody knew what being a media company in the internet age meant. For another example, see AOL/Time-Warner. Being a media company was perceived (and compensated) as more valuable than a tech company. Just the opposite of the perception now.
- nolok 8y ago
  I understand but hey if it's pre 2010 and you're holding one of the big three king of emails I don't care what you think: you're a tech company, deal with it.
wybiral 8y ago
> The best non-yahoo similarity I can find is what Google is doing with Blogger. That's a good point. But to be fair everything "social" that Google has touched has died with the exception of YouTube. In fact Google really hasn't done a great job holding onto many other arenas than their main ones. Blogger has been blasted by Medium. Knol was outlasted by Quora. Google Code was beat by Github. Their "shopping" attempts have always been eclipsed by Amazon. They can't get an edge with Google Cloud compared to Azure and AWS. Gmail, YouTube, Maps, and Android are all success stories. But if you look at their "social" products YT is really the only success story. EDIT: I use and love Google Photos but I can't remember the last time I heard someone talking about it. Instagram did it with a social spin.
- nolok 8y ago
  Yeah Google doesn't get social (you forgot Buzz in your list) but at least they try, and keep trying in different ways, like it different fields, until one sticks (you forgot Chrome in your success list - it doesn't bring money, but it allows them to partly dictate where the web goes and how it works, something that is a lot of value for them). When they get something that looks cool, they try it. Yahoo didn't even try, when they got something cool, they went "ah, nice" and then closed it or forgot about it. > EDIT: I use and love Google Photos but I can't remember the last time I heard someone talking about it. Instagram did it with a social spin. Same, but as the same time, I would wager pretty much every android users uses it, and has more photos on it than on instagram. It seems the value of google photos for google is not to monetize it directly, but as a way to 1. have data to mine, 2. know more about each user to improve their other revenue source and 3. to keep the user tied to his google account and ecosystem. From that point of view, it's a massive success (and it explains why they went that route and pretty much killed picasa instead of the opposite).
  - jacques_chester 8y ago
    Chrome is and was a fortress intended to defend the approach to their river of gold: advertising. A dominant browser controlled by another technology company is an existential risk to Google as it would provide a point at which their advertising could be entirely disintermediated. Android exists for the same reason.
sys_64738 8y ago
Yahoo failed because they were a directory service that saw the search box as less relevant. Google recognized that searching is the human approach, not ordering stuff into folders, which is an obsessive compulsive trait.
- abruzzi 8y ago
  Categorization and catalogs go back centuries so I don’t think I’d call it an OCD trait. Early search engines (90s) were very bad, the change that caught Yahoo was the quality of search. I remember doing searches on altavista, getting a million hits, and at least the first dozen were nothing but log files. The game changer for search was its ability to prioritize relevant content over accidental matches. That started training us to search, which was a new way to interact with information. You couldn’t search an printed encyclopedia. In the 90s Yahoo was much more useful than Webcrawler.
  - hasbot 8y ago
    The other game changer was speed. Altavista and other early search engines were incredibly slow.
rustcharm 8y ago
A very good point. It was hard to know what Yahoo was (or is). In the beginning, remember, they weren't a search engine. They were a curated directory of the Internet. In fact, it was hard for me to realize when they dumped that entirely and switched to a real search engine--despite the fact that I was in this business: I worked for Infoseek!
rayvy 8y ago
> The worst part is that Yahoo innovated a lot ^ This! Yahoo innovated a ton! Everything from the software infrastructure level (a few submissions to the Apache Big Data suite), to the hardware infrastructure level (data centers) to acquisitions (had they just made a mobile app of Flickr they would've had Instagram years before Instagram). But yes, their biggest problem to me, seemed to be by far and large lack of leadership (e.g., the CEO turnover) Disclosure: previously worked at Yahoo
LiweiZ 8y ago
Big companies seem to have industries as their unit of operation. If this is generally true, top leaders have very limited detailed input/output into a specific product itself. Many resources can not be taken into the process of a product evolution. Put it simple, top leaders of a big company usually have quite different direct goals instead of a product. A product's evolution depends on the options and resources a product team can have in a time frame. The rest of a big company is meaningless. The bigger the overlap of top leaders have with the product team, the better chance the product can evolve with the market demand. Jobs comes to my mind.
damontal 8y ago
That reminds me of yahoo pipes. Cool idea but I don’t think it went anywhere.
- egfx 8y ago
  Pipes was the best thing to come out of Yahoo. They prematurely killed it off. Way ahead of it's time and a product with seriously good utility, unlike Wave.

by nolok 8y ago

isolli 8y ago

Required 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 ago
That 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).
- abavuki 8y ago
  Wouldn't Netflix become another name on the list of failed acquisitions, like Flickr?
  - rustcharm 8y ago
    That's what I believe, too. If Yahoo had acquired Netflix, or Facebook, they wouldn't have succeeded either.
- kbutler 8y ago
  I think nobody knew what being a media company in the internet age meant. For another example, see AOL/Time-Warner. Being a media company was perceived (and compensated) as more valuable than a tech company. Just the opposite of the perception now.
nolok 8y ago
I understand but hey if it's pre 2010 and you're holding one of the big three king of emails I don't care what you think: you're a tech company, deal with it.

wybiral 8y ago

> The best non-yahoo similarity I can find is what Google is doing with Blogger. That's a good point. But to be fair everything "social" that Google has touched has died with the exception of YouTube. In fact Google really hasn't done a great job holding onto many other arenas than their main ones. Blogger has been blasted by Medium. Knol was outlasted by Quora. Google Code was beat by Github. Their "shopping" attempts have always been eclipsed by Amazon. They can't get an edge with Google Cloud compared to Azure and AWS. Gmail, YouTube, Maps, and Android are all success stories. But if you look at their "social" products YT is really the only success story. EDIT: I use and love Google Photos but I can't remember the last time I heard someone talking about it. Instagram did it with a social spin.

nolok 8y ago
Yeah Google doesn't get social (you forgot Buzz in your list) but at least they try, and keep trying in different ways, like it different fields, until one sticks (you forgot Chrome in your success list - it doesn't bring money, but it allows them to partly dictate where the web goes and how it works, something that is a lot of value for them). When they get something that looks cool, they try it. Yahoo didn't even try, when they got something cool, they went "ah, nice" and then closed it or forgot about it. > EDIT: I use and love Google Photos but I can't remember the last time I heard someone talking about it. Instagram did it with a social spin. Same, but as the same time, I would wager pretty much every android users uses it, and has more photos on it than on instagram. It seems the value of google photos for google is not to monetize it directly, but as a way to 1. have data to mine, 2. know more about each user to improve their other revenue source and 3. to keep the user tied to his google account and ecosystem. From that point of view, it's a massive success (and it explains why they went that route and pretty much killed picasa instead of the opposite).
- jacques_chester 8y ago
  Chrome is and was a fortress intended to defend the approach to their river of gold: advertising. A dominant browser controlled by another technology company is an existential risk to Google as it would provide a point at which their advertising could be entirely disintermediated. Android exists for the same reason.

sys_64738 8y ago

Yahoo failed because they were a directory service that saw the search box as less relevant. Google recognized that searching is the human approach, not ordering stuff into folders, which is an obsessive compulsive trait.

abruzzi 8y ago
Categorization and catalogs go back centuries so I don’t think I’d call it an OCD trait. Early search engines (90s) were very bad, the change that caught Yahoo was the quality of search. I remember doing searches on altavista, getting a million hits, and at least the first dozen were nothing but log files. The game changer for search was its ability to prioritize relevant content over accidental matches. That started training us to search, which was a new way to interact with information. You couldn’t search an printed encyclopedia. In the 90s Yahoo was much more useful than Webcrawler.
- hasbot 8y ago
  The other game changer was speed. Altavista and other early search engines were incredibly slow.

rustcharm 8y ago

A very good point. It was hard to know what Yahoo was (or is). In the beginning, remember, they weren't a search engine. They were a curated directory of the Internet. In fact, it was hard for me to realize when they dumped that entirely and switched to a real search engine--despite the fact that I was in this business: I worked for Infoseek!

rayvy 8y ago

> The worst part is that Yahoo innovated a lot ^ This! Yahoo innovated a ton! Everything from the software infrastructure level (a few submissions to the Apache Big Data suite), to the hardware infrastructure level (data centers) to acquisitions (had they just made a mobile app of Flickr they would've had Instagram years before Instagram). But yes, their biggest problem to me, seemed to be by far and large lack of leadership (e.g., the CEO turnover) Disclosure: previously worked at Yahoo

LiweiZ 8y ago

Big companies seem to have industries as their unit of operation. If this is generally true, top leaders have very limited detailed input/output into a specific product itself. Many resources can not be taken into the process of a product evolution. Put it simple, top leaders of a big company usually have quite different direct goals instead of a product. A product's evolution depends on the options and resources a product team can have in a time frame. The rest of a big company is meaningless. The bigger the overlap of top leaders have with the product team, the better chance the product can evolve with the market demand. Jobs comes to my mind.

damontal 8y ago

That reminds me of yahoo pipes. Cool idea but I don’t think it went anywhere.

egfx 8y ago
Pipes was the best thing to come out of Yahoo. They prematurely killed it off. Way ahead of it's time and a product with seriously good utility, unlike Wave.