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We were told at Yahoo! that it was pointless to compete with Google and Microsoft at search because Yahoo! were not willing to put in the money to have their ow
by andy_ppp 3y ago
We were told at Yahoo! that it was pointless to compete with Google and Microsoft at search because Yahoo! were not willing to put in the money to have their own search engine. At the time they were still the most popular webpage on the Internet. What really irritated me about this was the idea you could just look at a spreadsheet and decide if you'll be successful at search or anything else for that matter, startups constantly prove that resources don't automatically equal success... it sort of summed up the jail Yahoo! and Carol Bartz created and the thought process involved in that company's demise. MBAs have a lot to answer for IMO.
- itronitron 3y agoHow do people deal with such poor leadership? One of the founders of Lucene worked at Yahoo for a time so Yahoo certainly could have done something distinctive in the search space.
- Joeri 3y agoThey don’t. They leave. When enough of them leave a negative spiral sets in, until most of whose left are people who have nowhere else to go. You would think that kills a company, but a big company can survive decades in that mode, just slowly riding the elevator all the way down.
- doubled112 3y agoThe Dead Sea effect?
- johnnyanmac 3y agoYou give feedback, they ignore it, and you leave. Most engineers don't want to spend their times fighting politics instead of doing their job. And if leadership doesn't have confidence in your job, why should you not seek a place that does? Not like there's really much employee retention factors these days.
- latchkey 3y agoDoug worked at Apple on v-twin [0]. He has a long history of building search related products. By the way, after co-founding Jakarta, I was the one who brought him and Lucene into the ASF and the rest is history. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Cutting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Cutting
- indigochill 3y agoResources don't equal success, but both startups and incumbents need business plans: how they'll turn success into revenue. I'm too young to remember, but was there a clear business plan supporting search at the time? Obviously Google has since proven that capturing a major chunk of the ad industry has made competing on search very worth it, but I don't remember if that was evident at the time. But I feel like the ad leverage came later in Google's life. Then if you're trying to decide whether to bet on search at the time, the payoff may not be as evident without that insight.
- andy_ppp 3y agoHire the best (search) people, give them all the resources you can and leave them alone. They should come up with the plan, not the CEO.
- error_logic 3y agoIt's far from guaranteed even then for the executives to have the skills necessary to determine who is best, or even qualified, within a given timescale of operational metrics.