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It's so interesting to me how you can get these large companies that stay around even though they don't innovate. I mean, I don't explicitly use yahoo services
by phuff 15y ago
It's so interesting to me how you can get these large companies that stay around even though they don't innovate. I mean, I don't explicitly use yahoo services for nearly anything. I occasionally look at flickr photos these days (other people's not mine). I occasionally go to a yahoo group I joined 4-5 years ago. Once a year I do a march madness bracket there. But that's it. There's nothing compelling there for me. (I use yahoo messenger along with 3 or 4 other backends via adium, but it's not my preferred backend... I use it because I know people who prefer it.)
What's amazing is that while clearly Yahoo isn't innovating, and clearly they're having trouble, there's still (apparently) enough people that go there on a regular basis that they are generating _some_ kind of revenue. That to me is amazing: when a company gets big enough it can become a sort of "perpetual motion" machine that keeps chugging in revenue even when it's not "successful" by any normal sense of the word.
- maratd 15y agoYou do not have to innovate to be successful. The overwhelming majority of profitable businesses out there have never innovated and never will. All you have to do is provide value. In fact, the majority of innovative businesses fail and fail miserably. You still have to translate innovation to value. That's really hard.
- eropple 15y agoExactly. You know what business will (almost) never go broke? A mortician. How much innovation's necessary there?
- true_religion 15y agoInnovation is actually banned by law for mortuaries in many jurisdictions. So you have to use chemical X from select manufacturers Y, and place dead body in box T with procedure Q.
- eropple 15y agoGood point. Not like it'd be accepted anyway.
- garbowza 15y agoNot true. You'd be surprised at how much innovation is in the industry, particularly with respect to social media. I know: my company provides web based software to funeral homes and mortuaries. We let them design headstones online. We even put QR codes on the headstones to make it easy to find the deceased individual's online obituary within the cemetery.
- jimbokun 15y agoI attended a talk Bob Sutton (Stanford professor) gave on innovation. One of the first things he talked about was all of the times you do not want to innovate. If you're building a bridge, you probably want to build one with a design and techniques that have been proven to work. There are many other kinds of tasks where repeatability and reliability are more important than innovation. Handling dead bodies probably falls into that category.
- PakG1 15y agoQuote from Warren Buffet: Our approach is very much profiting from lack of change rather than from change. With Wrigley chewing gum, it's the lack of change that appeals to me. I don't think it is going to be hurt by the Internet. That's the kind of business I like.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- chollida1 15y agoWell I think you answered the question about how they hang around when you said, and I'm paraphrasing.... "I don't use any of their products, except for this one, this one, this one occasionally and oh these other two." If most of the internet population is like you then yahoo will end up being one of the most trafficked sites on the internet, which it is. The unfortunate thing for them is that little of this traffic monitizes, which is what advertisers have mostly figured out.