7 ms·

Seems like solid advice. I have an honest question, even if it's a quote from Office Space: What is it that Yahoo actually does? I honestly don't know. I know

Seems like solid advice. I have an honest question, even if it's a quote from Office Space: What is it that Yahoo actually does? I honestly don't know. I know they have a random collection of services (news, photos, mail), but if they were to disappear tomorrow, would anyone really care?

ChuckMcM 14y ago
They are good with customers.
- notime 14y ago
  Customers of what, exactly? I've not heard of anyone using Yahoo, except those that are holding on to Yahoo email addresses because they don't know it makes them look old and technically illiterate.
  - _delirium 14y ago
    I use quite a few of their services, some for legacy reasons. I use Flickr, admin a few mailing lists on Yahoo Groups, and am just in the process of convincing my muscle memory to move over from finance.yahoo.com to finance.google.com.
    - spullara 14y ago
      My guess is that Google Finance and other copycat sites (albeit better sites in some cases) that they have built are not good investments. If it isn't core to them I don't expect them to keep working on them.
  - oskee80 14y ago
    I think he was referencing the Office Space comparison and Smykowski defending his job by saying he was good with customers.
  - timaelliott 14y ago
    He already told you, they are good with the goddamn customers. They have people skills, they are good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you?
khill 14y ago
Exactly my feelings. They were a search engine I never used, a mail account which only received spam, some mailing lists which were moved to better open-source solutions, and then a "media portal company" which seemed like it just regurgitated content from other sites. I like some of the products which have come from Yahoo like their JavaScript libraries and YSlow toolkit. However, there are alternative (and in most cases better) options for those libraries so I don't really know what I need Yahoo to do for me.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
kruk 14y ago
I used to think Yahoo!'s days are over but it turns out it's hugely popular in Asia (Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan). Search engine wise it's behind Google but it's big when it comes to e-mail, news and all sorts of media content.
- TimJRobinson 14y ago
  I was going to say the same thing. I had a girlfriend from Taiwan studying in Australia who used Yahoo for most of the things she did online (email, search, shopping) and said most of her friends did too. This was in 2007 so things might have changed since then but even in 2007 most westerners thought Yahoo was dead and no one used it.
  - kruk 14y ago
    I have a girlfriend from Singapore and she is still using Yahoo extensively. Plus I discussed search engines with my Japanese teacher and few Asian students and most of them considered Yahoo the most popular website on the Internet.
- SkyMarshal 14y ago
  Interesting, maybe they should have promoted the Asian division head to CEO...
- RandallBrown 14y ago
  search engine wise, it uses Bing.
- tomflack 14y ago
  This is true, but organisational wise the Asian Yahoo! divisions are not wholly owned by Yahoo! as we know it. Yahoo! Japan for instance is a separately listed company part owned by Softbank. A friend of mine went for an interview at yahoo japan and was told "we don't have much to do with yahoo america so you'll never be sent to work there". But you're right, it seems like an obvious strength to capitalize on.
notJim 14y ago
I am told by sports fans that Yahoo's sports content and fantasy sports leagues are quite good (I have no idea, please don't yell at me if you disagree.) They also own flickr, which I'm sure you knew. I am quite certain that people would care if these things, along with their @yahoo.com email addresses disappeared tomorrow. I'm sure you knew this too, because email is central to our online lives at this point. So okay, you actually do know what yahoo does. What you don't know is their purpose. Google's purpose is to index all the worlds information (and then slap ads on it, but first one, then the other.) Apple's purpose is to make really great products, and then market them so well that people think they're even greater. So, given what we know yahoo has, what's a consistent product story they could tell that would answer the question that comes up again and again?
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  Google, Yahoo, and Apple's purpose is to maximize shareholder value. Those other things are just marketing fluff. Yahoo could do with some better marketing.
  - chrisro 14y ago
    I really hate this sentiment. I think Ray Anderson, founder of Interface has it right: "For those who think business exists to make a profit, I suggest they think again. Business makes a profit to exist. Surely it must exist for some higher, nobler purpose than that."
    - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
      That's a cute sentiment and there are many small businesses that adhere to it.
      - chrisro 14y ago
        Google seems to adhere to it as well. Google's founders (reluctantly) embraced text ads as a way to make the company they wanted to lead profitable so that it could continue to exist. I think modern business loses sight of this idea.
MatthewPhillips 14y ago
Yahoo produces web software that it gives to customers for free and then sells ads against. They are profitable doing this. They valley makes fun of them because the valley doesn't value profitable businesses, the valley values consumer craze for a product.
- dkrich 14y ago
  I'm not sure why Yahoo gets beat up so much either. They are profitable and get lambasted while Zynga and Groupon are tech darlings while their stock price plummets and they lose hundreds of millions of dollars. Yahoo gets insulted and asked to go away for suing Facebook, while Apple repeatedly attempts to prevent Samsung from being able to sell devices because of some very flimsy patent objections and people laud them as creative geniuses.
  - ikailan 14y ago
    I don't think Zynga and Groupon are tech darlings ...
    - MartinCron 14y ago
      Maybe Zynga and Groupon were tech darlings?
      - dkrich 14y ago
        Well the ZNGA IPO wasn't all that long ago. Just prior to that was the move to the huge amusement park-style office complex in downtown SF. I have friends who work there and are constantly posting pics of the awesome food and all-expense paid trips. These are things employees should get for performing well and making boatloads of cash. If you went purely by appearances, you'd assume ZNGA was one of the most wildly profitable companies on earth as opposed to one that is losing $1.30/share. I for one wouldn't invest a dime in the company when you see how irresponsibly they spend.
- drewrv 14y ago
rokhayakebe 14y ago
You, most of the HN crowd, and myself live in a world removed from the real world. I work for a company which sells fancy business cards and print products to dentists who easily spend more than $1000 on one order, and you know what? They usually have an earthlink.net, aol.com, or yahoo.com email address, and nothing in this world is going to make them change that. I tell some customers we can set them up with your own business email FOR FREE, and they simply politely refuse. Yahoo has the eyeballs of people who actually spend money, not people like myself who want free email and who are trained to never click on an ad.
- retroafroman 14y ago
  Agree hugely on the 'separate world'. Anecdotally, most people I know outside the USA (and quite a few non-tech friends in the states) use yahoo, hotmail, and live.com addresses as well. I think their worldwide marketshare is rather high.
- Maro 14y ago
  I'm now part of a team working on a new product that just launched (not Google). Every morning I go in and look at the dashboard, which shows the email addresses of the last 10 new signups. About 6-7 is gmail, 1 yahoo, 1 hotmail. There's usually 1 that's a custom email like from an unknown domain. I don't have hard stats as I don't have access to the user db, but I've been playing this game for 1+ month every morning, and it's the same pattern all the time. This is for early adopters. Also, from personal experience, most of my acquaintances, whether technical or not, are migrating from yahoo/hotmail to gmail. It's pretty common for me to have to remove somebody's old yahoo email address from my contacts because they finally got a gmail address.
  - ianbishop 14y ago
    Generally early adopters tend to be tech people though, which would explain the gmail addresses.
    - Maro 14y ago
      I know, that's why I wrote "This is for early adopters."
runako 14y ago
Yahoo! Finance is considered by many to be the best out there. It would be a net loss to have to switch to e.g. Google Finance.
prostoalex 14y ago
Your question is not as funny as it sounds. To quote http://money.cnn.com//2012/07/17/technology/yahoo-earnings-mess/ http://money.cnn.com//2012/07/17/technology/yahoo-earnings-m... the market has pretty much dismissed any non-Asian *.yahoo.com properties: "Yahoo's Asian assets are worth $20.5 billion, according to Yahoo's latest financial report: $14 billion for its 40% ownership stake in Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba and $6.5 billion for the company's 35% share of Yahoo Japan. Yahoo's market capitalization currently sits at $19 billion. Ouch."
Jare 14y ago
tl;dr: there's value in an integrated product that works and is easy to use: just ask Apple. An 'internet portal' is still very valuable to non-techie users: it provides them a reasonably structured way to access internet services and goods. My email? Here. Stock? There. News? All over the page. Photos? You got it. Chat? Games? Calendar? The weather? Search? As long as it's good enough, it's right there so, sure. Of course, no future-looking company wants to compete in that market with their own similar product, so until that space gets completely 'disrupted' (what Google tried to with by ripping it to pieces) or 'reinvented' (social networks being the latest incumbent) or completely 'moved' (to a different access model like mobile), many people will continue existing solutions like Yahoo. We recently released one of our Facebook games on Yahoo. The numbers were not groundbreaking or headline material, but it still surprised us that they were meaningful.
kalleboo 14y ago
It's surprising how much traffic they still get. Our year-old iOS game was just mentioned in a roundup of "top 10 difficult games" on a Yahoo! Games blog (and it wasn't even linked properly to the App Store), sending sales from 2 digits to 4 digits/day. We were floored that this happened due to a Yahoo post of all things...

ChuckMcM 14y ago

They are good with customers.

notime 14y ago
Customers of what, exactly? I've not heard of anyone using Yahoo, except those that are holding on to Yahoo email addresses because they don't know it makes them look old and technically illiterate.
- _delirium 14y ago
  I use quite a few of their services, some for legacy reasons. I use Flickr, admin a few mailing lists on Yahoo Groups, and am just in the process of convincing my muscle memory to move over from finance.yahoo.com to finance.google.com.
  - spullara 14y ago
    My guess is that Google Finance and other copycat sites (albeit better sites in some cases) that they have built are not good investments. If it isn't core to them I don't expect them to keep working on them.
- oskee80 14y ago
  I think he was referencing the Office Space comparison and Smykowski defending his job by saying he was good with customers.
- timaelliott 14y ago
  He already told you, they are good with the goddamn customers. They have people skills, they are good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you?

khill 14y ago

Exactly my feelings. They were a search engine I never used, a mail account which only received spam, some mailing lists which were moved to better open-source solutions, and then a "media portal company" which seemed like it just regurgitated content from other sites. I like some of the products which have come from Yahoo like their JavaScript libraries and YSlow toolkit. However, there are alternative (and in most cases better) options for those libraries so I don't really know what I need Yahoo to do for me.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

kruk 14y ago

I used to think Yahoo!'s days are over but it turns out it's hugely popular in Asia (Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan). Search engine wise it's behind Google but it's big when it comes to e-mail, news and all sorts of media content.

TimJRobinson 14y ago
I was going to say the same thing. I had a girlfriend from Taiwan studying in Australia who used Yahoo for most of the things she did online (email, search, shopping) and said most of her friends did too. This was in 2007 so things might have changed since then but even in 2007 most westerners thought Yahoo was dead and no one used it.
- kruk 14y ago
  I have a girlfriend from Singapore and she is still using Yahoo extensively. Plus I discussed search engines with my Japanese teacher and few Asian students and most of them considered Yahoo the most popular website on the Internet.
SkyMarshal 14y ago
Interesting, maybe they should have promoted the Asian division head to CEO...
RandallBrown 14y ago
search engine wise, it uses Bing.
tomflack 14y ago
This is true, but organisational wise the Asian Yahoo! divisions are not wholly owned by Yahoo! as we know it. Yahoo! Japan for instance is a separately listed company part owned by Softbank. A friend of mine went for an interview at yahoo japan and was told "we don't have much to do with yahoo america so you'll never be sent to work there". But you're right, it seems like an obvious strength to capitalize on.

notJim 14y ago

I am told by sports fans that Yahoo's sports content and fantasy sports leagues are quite good (I have no idea, please don't yell at me if you disagree.) They also own flickr, which I'm sure you knew. I am quite certain that people would care if these things, along with their @yahoo.com email addresses disappeared tomorrow. I'm sure you knew this too, because email is central to our online lives at this point. So okay, you actually do know what yahoo does. What you don't know is their purpose. Google's purpose is to index all the worlds information (and then slap ads on it, but first one, then the other.) Apple's purpose is to make really great products, and then market them so well that people think they're even greater. So, given what we know yahoo has, what's a consistent product story they could tell that would answer the question that comes up again and again?

MatthewPhillips 14y ago
Google, Yahoo, and Apple's purpose is to maximize shareholder value. Those other things are just marketing fluff. Yahoo could do with some better marketing.
- chrisro 14y ago
  I really hate this sentiment. I think Ray Anderson, founder of Interface has it right: "For those who think business exists to make a profit, I suggest they think again. Business makes a profit to exist. Surely it must exist for some higher, nobler purpose than that."
  - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
    That's a cute sentiment and there are many small businesses that adhere to it.
    - chrisro 14y ago
      Google seems to adhere to it as well. Google's founders (reluctantly) embraced text ads as a way to make the company they wanted to lead profitable so that it could continue to exist. I think modern business loses sight of this idea.

MatthewPhillips 14y ago

Yahoo produces web software that it gives to customers for free and then sells ads against. They are profitable doing this. They valley makes fun of them because the valley doesn't value profitable businesses, the valley values consumer craze for a product.

dkrich 14y ago
I'm not sure why Yahoo gets beat up so much either. They are profitable and get lambasted while Zynga and Groupon are tech darlings while their stock price plummets and they lose hundreds of millions of dollars. Yahoo gets insulted and asked to go away for suing Facebook, while Apple repeatedly attempts to prevent Samsung from being able to sell devices because of some very flimsy patent objections and people laud them as creative geniuses.
- ikailan 14y ago
  I don't think Zynga and Groupon are tech darlings ...
  - MartinCron 14y ago
    Maybe Zynga and Groupon were tech darlings?
    - dkrich 14y ago
      Well the ZNGA IPO wasn't all that long ago. Just prior to that was the move to the huge amusement park-style office complex in downtown SF. I have friends who work there and are constantly posting pics of the awesome food and all-expense paid trips. These are things employees should get for performing well and making boatloads of cash. If you went purely by appearances, you'd assume ZNGA was one of the most wildly profitable companies on earth as opposed to one that is losing $1.30/share. I for one wouldn't invest a dime in the company when you see how irresponsibly they spend.
drewrv 14y ago

rokhayakebe 14y ago

You, most of the HN crowd, and myself live in a world removed from the real world. I work for a company which sells fancy business cards and print products to dentists who easily spend more than $1000 on one order, and you know what? They usually have an earthlink.net, aol.com, or yahoo.com email address, and nothing in this world is going to make them change that. I tell some customers we can set them up with your own business email FOR FREE, and they simply politely refuse. Yahoo has the eyeballs of people who actually spend money, not people like myself who want free email and who are trained to never click on an ad.

retroafroman 14y ago
Agree hugely on the 'separate world'. Anecdotally, most people I know outside the USA (and quite a few non-tech friends in the states) use yahoo, hotmail, and live.com addresses as well. I think their worldwide marketshare is rather high.
Maro 14y ago
I'm now part of a team working on a new product that just launched (not Google). Every morning I go in and look at the dashboard, which shows the email addresses of the last 10 new signups. About 6-7 is gmail, 1 yahoo, 1 hotmail. There's usually 1 that's a custom email like from an unknown domain. I don't have hard stats as I don't have access to the user db, but I've been playing this game for 1+ month every morning, and it's the same pattern all the time. This is for early adopters. Also, from personal experience, most of my acquaintances, whether technical or not, are migrating from yahoo/hotmail to gmail. It's pretty common for me to have to remove somebody's old yahoo email address from my contacts because they finally got a gmail address.
- ianbishop 14y ago
  Generally early adopters tend to be tech people though, which would explain the gmail addresses.
  - Maro 14y ago
    I know, that's why I wrote "This is for early adopters."

runako 14y ago

Yahoo! Finance is considered by many to be the best out there. It would be a net loss to have to switch to e.g. Google Finance.

prostoalex 14y ago

Your question is not as funny as it sounds. To quote http://money.cnn.com//2012/07/17/technology/yahoo-earnings-mess/ http://money.cnn.com//2012/07/17/technology/yahoo-earnings-m... the market has pretty much dismissed any non-Asian *.yahoo.com properties: "Yahoo's Asian assets are worth $20.5 billion, according to Yahoo's latest financial report: $14 billion for its 40% ownership stake in Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba and $6.5 billion for the company's 35% share of Yahoo Japan. Yahoo's market capitalization currently sits at $19 billion. Ouch."

Jare 14y ago

tl;dr: there's value in an integrated product that works and is easy to use: just ask Apple. An 'internet portal' is still very valuable to non-techie users: it provides them a reasonably structured way to access internet services and goods. My email? Here. Stock? There. News? All over the page. Photos? You got it. Chat? Games? Calendar? The weather? Search? As long as it's good enough, it's right there so, sure. Of course, no future-looking company wants to compete in that market with their own similar product, so until that space gets completely 'disrupted' (what Google tried to with by ripping it to pieces) or 'reinvented' (social networks being the latest incumbent) or completely 'moved' (to a different access model like mobile), many people will continue existing solutions like Yahoo. We recently released one of our Facebook games on Yahoo. The numbers were not groundbreaking or headline material, but it still surprised us that they were meaningful.

kalleboo 14y ago

It's surprising how much traffic they still get. Our year-old iOS game was just mentioned in a roundup of "top 10 difficult games" on a Yahoo! Games blog (and it wasn't even linked properly to the App Store), sending sales from 2 digits to 4 digits/day. We were floored that this happened due to a Yahoo post of all things...