9 ms·

What went wrong for Yahoo

rufus_foreman 1y ago
"In 1998, Yahoo turned down the opportunity to acquire Google for $1 million."
- unit149 1y ago
  [dead]
- jeffbee 1y ago
  Sure, but Google is not inflating due to a cosmological constant. If Yahoo had acquired Google, Google would now be worthless, not a trillion-dollar company.
  - rNULLED 1y ago
    what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?
    - dvh 1y ago
      From falsehood, anything follows. (I'm implying here that you don't have unstoppable force and you don't have immovable object)
      - DonHopkins 1y ago
        If your grandmother had wheels, then she's be a bicycle.
      - iluvlawyering 1y ago
        From contradiction, non-contradiction.
    - kstrauser 1y ago
      MSN.
      - gscott 1y ago
        I like how MSN manages to pack so much content onto a single page—it’s surprisingly intuitive. I’m not sure why that kind of formatting isn’t more common.
    - iluvlawyering 1y ago
      A deflection.
  - bborud 1y ago
    Exactly. Don't forget that Yahoo bought three search engines. (Full disclosure: I worked for one of the companies they acquired).
  - baal80spam 1y ago
    > Google is not inflating due to a cosmological constant Well put!
evanjrowley 1y ago
I am reminded of LICRA v. Yahoo. Another puzzling choice of Yahoo's that seems very wrong in hindsight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LICRA_v._Yahoo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LICRA_v._Yahoo!
thunderbong 1y ago
> In 1998, Yahoo turned down the opportunity to acquire Google for $1 million. Yahoo made six acquisitions that year, spending $107.3 million. > In 2002, Google offered to sell again for $1 billion. Yahoo hesitated and Google raised its price to $3 billion. Yahoo declined at the higher price. Google went on to become a trillion dollar company. > Yahoo attempted to acquire Facebook for $1 billion in 2006, but Mark Zuckerberg turned down the offer. Had Yahoo increased its offer by just $100 million, Facebook’s board would have forced Zuckerberg to take it. Facebook also became a trillion dollar company. In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo.
- jeffbee 1y ago
  > In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo. Yeah exactly. Also I would consider the Overture acquisition extremely successful because their patent lawsuit v. Google gave them 8% of Google pre-IPO. If held (which it was not), that is a substantial asset today.
  - arresin 1y ago
    They had 8% of Google at one point and sold it?!
  - jll29 1y ago
    You are spot on, but you are drawing a slightly wrong conclusion, IMHO: Yes, Overture what the best Yahoo! acquisition ever made. But Yahoo!'s greatest mistake was to settle the Google lawsuit for a few million dollars - which meant that Google could keep using Overture's (parented) invention of keyword bidding based advertising; without it, Google may never have found a way to become profitable. So Yahoo! bought its own gravestone for $50m, when all they would have had to do is stand firm and go to trial. If Y! exercised its government-awarded monopoly rights for keyword auction based advertising, there may still be that Y! portal that was so prominent in the early 2000s. PS: Yahoo Inc. is not full gone - Yahoo Japan remains the last independent part of the former Y! - see https://www.yahoo.co.jp https://www.yahoo.co.jp .
deleted 1y ago
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nertzy 1y ago
I am still a Yahoo! pinger as well. ~ ping yahoo.com PING yahoo.com (74.6.231.20): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 74.6.231.20: icmp_seq=0 ttl=50 time=42.366 ms ^C --- yahoo.com ping statistics --- 1 packets transmitted, 1 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 42.366/42.366/42.366/0.000 ms
- oreilles 1y ago
  I just tried, pinging Yahoo is about 20 times slower than pinging Google...
  - firefax 1y ago
    I decided to run a small experiment ping -c 20 -i 5 google.com; ping -c 20 -i 5 yahoo.com [snip] --- google.com ping statistics --- 20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 14.746/19.939/25.057/3.153 ms [snip] --- yahoo.com ping statistics --- 20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 14.561/20.883/25.080/2.675 ms They look comparable to me?
    - theshackleford 1y ago
      It would depend on where you are pinging from and if they have anything closer to you to respond. From where I am, google averages 4ms, yahoo is at 200ms+. Obviously because they dont have the money or marketshare to bother putting anything for me to route closer too.
    - jedberg 1y ago
      Same experiment from my gigabit link in Silicon Valley. Looks like Yahoo is about 3 times slower but far more consistent --- google.com ping statistics --- 20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 6.918/23.419/294.037/62.272 ms --- yahoo.com ping statistics --- 20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 78.056/78.940/80.940/0.811 ms Although what's interesting is that Yahoo is really more like 10 times slower (almost every ping was in the 6-8ms range), it's just that there was just that one packet at 300ms and other at 30ms that really blew out the average.
econ 1y ago
I wasn't there but from talking with people working there it was a culture of waiting for the next paycheck and staying under the radar, not caring and not doing much work. Some 20-30 people I chat with were all the kind you should immediately fire and escort out of the building. Some had their next job lined up already just in case. lol
jjbinx007 1y ago
It was only just over a decade ago I used to play lots of the online games hosted on Yahoo and it was great! I had just started dating my (now) wife and we used to hang out every evening in an online video conference and play online versions of Pool, Risk etc, and as it was all inside Yahoo's ecosystem we only had to login once and we could automatically play each other. Going further back, Yahoo's web directory was also a good and fun way to explore the world wide web. When Google appeared, and its search was so good, the concept of "people don't need bookmarks any more" seemed to spread, but in the process the joy of discovery was lost. Rather like how browsing DVDs in Blockbuster means you could find something really cool by accident, but searching a database means you have to have an idea what you want to find to begin with.
zippyman55 1y ago
To me, Yahoo always seemed more trustworthy than Google or Facebook.
- distances 1y ago
  I started using Internet actively around 1996 or so. For me Yahoo practically didn't even exist, their homepage was a hodgepodge of everything and I couldn't figure out why I would go there. My search usage was mainly AltaVista with some HotBot, Northern Light, and Raging Search mixed in. But never Yahoo.
  - mrkramer 1y ago
    Yahoo wanted to be internet's hotspot for everything....ironically enough Google become that despite the fact that they rose to power because of their minimalism and search focus.
mkagenius 1y ago
Just checked Marissa Mayer's X account, can someone explain why is her account not getting enough views/reach - https://x.com/marissamayer https://x.com/marissamayer She apparently has 1.4M followers with barely 20 likes. This was even worse a few months back. Are those followers bought / dormant? Or is twitter suppressing it?
- jeffbee 1y ago
  Nobody currently uses Twitter so follower count implies nothing. Lots of notorious figures have posted regarding how they get the same interaction rate on Bluesky even though they supposedly have 10x or even 1000x more followers on Twitter. For example: https://bsky.app/profile/brandonfriedman.bsky.social/post/3lu7adqjhvk27 https://bsky.app/profile/brandonfriedman.bsky.social/post/3l...
- add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
  It's a ghost town for anything substantive, if she's not shouting about culture war stuff she's not likely to get much engagement.
  - bigstrat2003 1y ago
    > It's a ghost town for anything substantive It always was. Twitter delenda est is a meme for a reason.
- eastbound 1y ago
  I can’t, but influence is bought and temporary. People aren’t found off the person, but what she represents in society. And since she spent 8 years buried at Yahoo!, busy executing the winddown plan (masterfully), she may have inadvertently communicated that she’s expert in liquidation. Not something you follow when you want to know what the future is. (Insert a distasteful joke about how she would have made a killing at DOGE).
- blitzar 1y ago
  Twitter is all bots.
- 1y ago
drewg123 1y ago
I do miss them being one of the biggest FreeBSD contributors. For a long time in the late 90s / early 2000s Yahoo was to FreeBSD what Netflix is now (and maybe a bit more). They used to host a lot of the FreeBSD build/test infrastructure and employed several src committers and they contributed heavily to a LOT of work that has made FreeBSD a viable OS going forward. For example, they contributed heavily to the SMPng project (which made FreeBSD into a modern, multi-theaded kernel with fine grained locking). They even hosted the kickoff meeting: https://people.freebsd.org/~fsmp/SMP/SMPmeeting.html https://people.freebsd.org/~fsmp/SMP/SMPmeeting.html They employed Peter Wemm, who did the majority of the work for the AMD64 (eg, x86-64) port. And lots that I'm forgetting about probably..
- chris_j 1y ago
  What happened? Did they stop using FreeBSD? Did they continue to use it but jsut stop contributing?
  - otterley 1y ago
    Yes, we migrated over to Linux for a number of reasons, among them 1/higher developer mindshare, and 2/Linux had better SMP performance for the first decade or so vs. FreeBSD as we started to buy beefier multi-core and multi-socket servers.
    - ksec 1y ago
      I thought it was Marisa Meyer that forced the change?
      - otterley 1y ago
        No, this process began long before she joined the company.
        ksec 1y ago
        Sigh. I often think an erosion of tech stack also brings erosion of company culture and value.
russellbeattie 1y ago
As a ex-Yahoo! from 20 years ago, I have a very clear opinion about the downfall of the company: Yahoo! had spent years structuring itself as a "media" company - not a technology company - but nonsensically, it also wanted to be Google. Yes, Yahoo! had parts of the company that were extremely technologically advanced, but they hired Hollywood execs and MBAs to run the company through the 2000s - people who had no real technological vision at all. Yahoo!'s greatest strength and primary role in the Internet could be summarized as this: It was the most useful site on the web. Users relied on it for their start page, email, finance, weather, news, sports, maps, casual multiplayer games, forums, instant messaging, answers, fantasy sports, evites, photos, and an amazing amount of search traffic. It was a one-stop shop for everything you needed online. Maybe not the best in every area, but always pretty good. You know how Google starts and kills products constantly? Yahoo! rarely did that. It saw interesting business models, copied them or bought into them and kept them going and users loved them for it. And all of this was profitable, just not Google-level profits. Remember Jack Welch's mantra of GE not having to be number one in every market as long as they were number two or three and were profitable? At one point, this was Yahoo! and they could have remained relevant to this day had they embraced this role. But the company's divisions were siloed and competed against each other in a way that makes Microsoft machiavellianism seem like a Sunday picnic. And the leadership was obsessed with Google and wanted to outdo them, even though they had a completely different culture and mindset. It was never going to happen. Regardless, they ignored Yahoo!'s bread and butter services, confused their employees and customers, and generally ran the company into the ground. Yahoo! needed strong leadership that understood the company's strengths and built on them to continue to be useful to web users. Sadly, that never happened.
- dh2022 1y ago
  Besides HN, Yahoo is still my only other news portal. (Yes, I am that old.)
- thijson 1y ago
  I remember in the late 90's switching from yahoo to google because google's search results were better. I also set my homepage to google because the homepage was so fast to load, it wasn't all cluttered up like the yahoo homepage. I remember when I saw google for the first time, it was while searching for stuff on the redhat website, and I saw the Gooooogle at the bottom. I guess google had indexed the website for them. That led me to check out the google web site itself. I think at some point that google was indexing the web for yahoo, I could be wrong though.
hshshshshsh 1y ago
Everyone is a genius writing what went wrong but never have the guts to short it as it unfolds.
- WA 1y ago
  I agree and would’ve written the same several years ago. Unfortunately, shorting is expensive and you have to get the timing right, too, not only the direction of the stock. If you’re early when shorting, you’re still wrong.
  - mixmastamyk 1y ago
    Also a slow decline is not lucrative enough in comparison to the risk.
- LarMachinarum 1y ago
  In all fairness, that really stands to reason: retrospective analysis is enormously much easier, more precise and less risky than prediction, for the simple reason that after the fact (especially this long and with lots of inside people having spoken up since), there is enormously more data available than before it went downhill. So it's much less a question of having guts than of having access to sufficient data to see enough of the whole picture.
figital 1y ago
del.icio.us was my favorite tool on the internet for a few years (perhaps even still in retrospect). And not far off from the same functionality as Facebook (today). Why purchase such a thing to shut it down? Money which needed to be burned I guess (for accounting tricks).
can16358p 1y ago
Yahoo literally did every wrong move and turned every move that could make it become successful again down, almost as if it deliberate. I can't believe it still exists.
reacweb 1y ago
I think that Marissa Meyer had given yahoo back a bit of its lustre. That meant cutting dividends in favour of investment. Restoring a reputation takes time. I stopped taking an interest when she was ousted by impatient shareholders. I am not an insider, maybe I am wrong.
- drysart 1y ago
  She wasn't ousted because shareholders were impatient. She was ousted because under her leadership Yahoo had collapsed to the point that the only thing left to do was to sell it. When a new CEO is brought in to right a sinking ship (which Yahoo very much was at the time of her hiring), their number one responsibility is to have a solid core strategy based in leveraging the company's existing strengths and then execute competently on it. She had no solid core strategy. Her strategy at Yahoo, as she described it, was "to throw lots of spaghetti at the purple walls and see what sticks"; which is exactly what she needed to not be doing. She blew a lot of money on a lot of very varied things and ended up with lots of expensive puzzle pieces with no plan for how to fit them all together into something that would stop Yahoo's bleeding. At the end, the company as a whole had a valuation less than the company's Alibaba investment -- she drove Yahoo not just to zero, but past zero; and that's 100% due to her not understanding how to lead a shrinking company.
  - sfblah 1y ago
    This is basically correct.
nubinetwork 1y ago
Yahoo is still quite popular in Japan.
- nbf_1995 1y ago
  Yahoo Japan is a different company to Yahoo.
  - Capricorn2481 1y ago
    Yahoo itself is still used more than almost any site on the web. Including TikTok https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites How much of that is people not noticing it's their default browser page? Idk
- esafak 1y ago
  Does the Japanese Web still sport a 90s aesthetic? That would explain it.
HardCodedBias 1y ago
I think Yahoo faded into irrelevance since it viewed itself as a media company and not a technology company. Many internet companies fancied themselves media companies in the 1990s and 2000s. They all are on the scrap heap now, some examples: AOL, Yahoo, Excite@Home, Lycos, iVillage, About.com. The companies of the time that fancied themselves technology/infra/logistics did well: Google, Amazon, eBay/PayPal, Salesforce, Akamai, DoubleClick. Of course any lists like this have selection bias, so maybe I am wrong.
GCA10 1y ago
Yahoo did have a unique ability to smother any business that it acquired -- and I think the reasons go way beyond an inability to monetize them. In fact, I'd argue that it was actually Yahoo's fixation with short-term monetization strategies that eventually turned everything to dust. Consider Flickr, which Yahoo bought for about $25 million in 2005. If you're a tech visionary, you look at this popular little photo-sharing site and say: "Wow, everyone's connectivity speeds are soaring, and we could morph this into a video site, too!" And then, maybe, you've invented YouTube. Or, you look at the way Friendstr and Facebook are getting traction, and you say: "Wow, what if we built out easier commenting and a social-network feed with abundant sharing of popular photos among users' pals?" And then maybe you've invented Instagram. But Yahoo's metrics-driven managers refused to stretch their brains in this direction. I've been told by two famous-name insiders at the time that Yahoo's approach to everything was to set short-term targets focused on existing metrics, with rigid focus on hitting quarterly targets. It was all about driving orderly growth of what was already there, rather than any desire to explore new and uncharted areas. In essence, Yahoo had a Silicon Valley address but a Battle Creek, Mich., mindset. Purple logo aside, Yahoo owed a lot more to the way W.W. Kellogg had been running its cereal business for decades, as opposed to anything going on in the 650 area code.
- bsder 1y ago
  >And then, maybe, you've invented YouTube. SUPER unlikely. Everybody forgets that YouTube was a massive money loser that was floated by VC money. Had Google not bought YouTube, it was doomed.
  - everfrustrated 1y ago
    Youtube was also going to get buried under lawsuits for copyright infringement. Being part of a big brand gave them a lot of legal cover.
  - GCA10 1y ago
    That's actually the point. Yahoo in 2005 had the financial muscle -- and an interesting starting point via Flickr's user base -- to spin up its own version of YouTube without needing to do an acquisition. Stronger Yahoo leadership would have stomached the get-started costs of an internal build-out, because of a sense of what this could become. Yahoo just lacked the imagination and nerve necessary to see how its own assets could lead to the next big thing.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
katzgrau 1y ago
As a Y! employee for a couple of years - although my time was brief, I can say with confidence that had Yahoo successfully acquired Google or Facebook, both would have been destroyed in short order.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  Yes, but that just makes me wish it had happened...
  - mixmastamyk 1y ago
    Wish they’d been bought by MS, probably would have sidelined them. Was a really bad deal from memory.
    - rasz 1y ago
      Nobody can beat Yahoo in making bad deals. Lets not forget they made Mark Cuban a billionaire with a legendary Broadcast.com acquisition at $10K per user! $5.7 billion dollars written off in less than two years.
WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
Another football in the Verizon Yahoo/Shuffle are those Verizon customers who were sold to Frontier but had verizon.net email addresses. Verizon kept control of those lightly-maintained email accounts and pushed them into the Yahoo/AOL infrastructure. Users with a verizon.net email address had webmail access at mail.aol.com. Verizon didn't make life easy. They changed POP/IMAP/SMTP servers every year or so. Just this May they changed again, from smtp.mail.yahoo.com to smtp.verizon.net - but the old servers still worked until the AOL outage 2 days ago. During the years in between, customers got caught between AOL's mandate to use OAuth and Microsoft's refusal to support it in Outlook. FF to now-ish and Verizon is purchasing those same FiOS customers back again. One more smack with the Verizon ping-ping paddle.
- sanex 1y ago
  Customers who had sbcglobal and att email addresses ended up using Yahoo for email, which I always found ironic.
- ciabattabread 1y ago
  > but the old servers still worked until the AOL outage 2 days ago. So that explains why my dad's email suddenly couldn't send outgoing messages (the configuration, for years, was outgoing.yahoo.verizon.net with normal password). After what felt like an hour, what worked was changing it to smtp.mail.yahoo.com and using OAuth.
- qingcharles 1y ago
  It has caused no end of trouble for older folks who are still using yahoo.com and aol.com and sbcglobal email addresses who can't get any sort of sane support and are having a nightmare time getting into their email accounts that are linked to everything they've signed up for in the last 30 years.
DmitryOlshansky 1y ago
I recall the Zookeeper paper from Yahoo scientist which basically details a more useful version of Google’s chubby. I find reliability and design of Zookeeper fascinating these days cool kids use etcd mostly because of relatively complex protocol of Zookeeper (there is a few implementations but they lack the polish of Java client).
- gethly 1y ago
  iirc problem of the zookeeper was that it was a chunky java application. etcd is tiny go binary. so there is more to it than just complexity of the protocol itself.
- zX41ZdbW 1y ago
  There is a drop-in, protocol-compatible replacement for ZooKeeper - ClickHouse Keeper: https://clickhouse.com/clickhouse/keeper https://clickhouse.com/clickhouse/keeper Many applications depend on ZooKeeper's data model and client libraries, and can't switch to etcd. Things like watches and ephemeral nodes are different there.
JLO64 1y ago
Does anyone have a good book recommendation on Yahoo? I’d love to read more on the people who ran it into the ground.
ogou 1y ago
An underreported part of the Yahoo story is its relationship to India. I worked there during the Verizon years and heard the history. Yahoo was a forerunner of the "offshoring" of technology jobs to India. It moved lots of core operations to a small army of engineers there. They figured out that their American counterparts made substantially more money than they did, especially the middle managers. Waves of Indian employees began moving to Santa Clara and getting market rate wages. Suddenly, Yahoo wasn't saving as much money as they used to. I don't think it was a major factor in its overall financial decline, but it had some effect I'm sure. On a side note, I heard a couple of Indian engineers say they were moving back to raise their kids because they didn't like the cultural influences in our schools. There were many interesting lunchtime conversations about things like that.
- lifestyleguru 1y ago
  > On a side note, I heard a couple of Indian engineers say they were moving back to raise their kids because they didn't like the cultural influences in our school They didn't like the cultural influences by a culture which advanced their life prosperity so they relocate their children back to the culture where they will have to learn everything again by themselves.
andy_ppp 1y ago
I think the issue was the people running it were the type of people who are taught to ruthlessly look at a spreadsheet and decide if Coca Cola can invest X in marketing and product development they can expect to get Y back (with reasonable accuracy). Of course with software small teams can do big things so these calculations are almost impossible. Investing a billion dollars in your search engine in ~2008 might be considered insane of course. We were told by Carol Bartz at an all hands that they had done the work on their spreadsheets and they could not compete with the investment Microsoft and Google were planning. It still annoys me to this day that there was no discussion or attempt to decide if the engineers and the company were up for the challenge with Google, even with less money. I'm not saying Yahoo! would have won, but to not even have bothered trying still irritates me - where is your vision? where is your fight? Anyway this is my take on it, the management decided to just give up on being technically excellent and even being a software company at some point. The mind boggles why you would do this while software was eating the world and you had loads of fantastic engineering talent...
jackdawipper 1y ago
First Yahoo did Yahoo Serious, then Yahoo got did
calmbonsai 1y ago
In summary, decades of failed leadership resulting in zero corporate focus. They're the epitome of a corporate melange of services and products that resulted in far, far less than the sum of its parts.
reilly3000 1y ago
In an odd turn of events I have ben one a regular user of Yahoo! despite how terrible the experience and content is. It shipped as a Safari default years and years ago and has remained in my neglected Safari bookmarks for no particular reason. I’ve recently reverted to using Safari on iPhone as my default mobile browser and used to rely on my recently used tabs for a quick dopamine hit. Several months ago Apple removed that from the new tab experience, putting my bookmarks front and center. So I use Yahoo. It’s mostly clickbait content, heavily monetized, with all of the excrement of 20 years of AdTech on display. Ads routinely load in the wrong unit size, or with a double quote character that breaks the sticky container making it impossible to view the next page of comments. Most often the ads are mobile redirects that just crash the page and lose your scroll position. It’s really a terrible experience to behold. At least I don’t use social media.
drcode 1y ago
I feel like the correct, boring answer is "they didn't focus on getting people the best website for what they were searching for"
dehrmann 1y ago
This doesn't actually answer what went wrong for Yahoo!. The main insight is that Yahoo! saw that it made money from traffic, so it bought traffic generators without regard for if the traffic could be profitable. I buy this argument, but Yahoo!'s problem was people stopped going to Yahoo!, and none of its acquisitions were big enough to offset that.
- esafak 1y ago
  So you're saying their traffic generation did not work.
sdrothrock 1y ago
I wonder what went right with Yahoo Japan, and how it was so successful here that it's still a mainstay for many to this day Related post I saw an hour after writing this: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/edmund-ho-1277b2125_yahoo-japan-activity-7351162746920452096-LU3A https://www.linkedin.com/posts/edmund-ho-1277b2125_yahoo-jap...
jongjong 1y ago
I wonder how much macroeconomics and politics had to do with Yahoo's situation. During this period, the US had been exporting large amounts of dollars to foreign investors (US going into deficit) and these foreign investors didn't know what to do with all those dollars so they dumped them onto the US stock market. This has been going on for decades. It was the premise of the Japan carry trade. US companies like Google or Facebook would have had access to plenty of capital during this time and maybe it allowed them to be picky.
kocial 1y ago
People blaming the acquisition failure by/from Yahoo for the downfall are misinformed. The reason for Yahoo's failure was its loss of dominance in search to the Chrome Browser. Google's few actions made Google what it is today, and that starts with a few most critical: - Launch of browser ( Chrome browser ). It didn't even become a meme against Internet Explorer, but also defeated Mozilla Firefox in its own game. - Acquisition of YouTube. - Acquisition of Android. They are already doing other crazy innovation that makes them dominate the Industry. While Yahoo was only famous for - Yahoo Answers ( Quora took over that ), - Yahoo Mail ( Gmail took over that ), - Yahoo Chat ( the golden days ), and this one - Yahoo failed to capitalise with the change of ERA, WhatsApp would have never succeeded, if Yahoo had innovated its chat and entered the Mobile app segment.
- michaelt 1y ago
  > The reason for Yahoo's failure was its loss of dominance in search to the Chrome Browser. I'm afraid your timeline might be a bit off there. Yahoo outsourced their search to Google in 2000 [1] while google didn't buy android until ~2005 and chrome didn't come out until ~2008 [2]. And before google, yahoo had outsourced to 'Inktomi' and before that IIRC to 'Altavista' Yahoo wasn't even trying to compete in search. This was the era of companies like "AOL Time Warner" where people thought web portals were media companies, and company bosses spooked by the dot-com crash were trying to diversify into tangible assets. [1] https://www.wired.com/2000/06/yahoo-goes-gaga-for-google/ https://www.wired.com/2000/06/yahoo-goes-gaga-for-google/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome
  - lelanthran 1y ago
    > And before google, yahoo had outsourced to 'Inktomi' and before that IIRC to 'Altavista' > Yahoo wasn't even trying to compete in search. Yeah. This is a common MBA-ism: focus on the top of the value chain where the largest margin exists. The theory itself is actually not wrong, TBH; it's just that Yahoo misidentified where the top of the value chain lay. They thought the top of the value chain was the users, and that sponsered content was the product. Google correctly identified the users as the product and the advertisers as the top of the value chain. IOW, Yahoo sold curated content (product) to users (customers). Google sold users (product) to the advertisers (customers). To Yahoo, the people visiting their site was the top of the value chain if you're directly pitching products to those users!
maltelandwehr 1y ago
I do not think it was just the bad acquisitions. Yahoo also turned from a tech company into a media company. At some point, every decision was made with a media company mindset. This includes making decisions that prioritize short-term revenue over building growth loops or enhancing user retention. Also, no investments into technology. Browser, CDN, proper web hosting, cloud - they missed everything.
jaza 1y ago
I miss Yahoo Games. My favourite was dominoes, many hours spent in there as a teenager. The only Yahoo thing I've accessed for the past decade or so is Finance, the stock price info and the investing news seems to still be reasonable.
farazbabar 1y ago
I interviewed at yahoo during the tenure of Marissa Meyer and decided not to join after noticing a strange lack of diversity in my interviewers (I saw a similar lack of diversity at Apple Pay much more recently), anytime top level organizations become infested by monocultures, it becomes impossible for progress, new ideas and innovation to take foot. It doesn’t matter which clique or group has infected the organization by giving priority to conformity over diversity, it all ends the same way. This is not a call for institutional DEI, this is about being on the lookout for monocultures in innovative organizations.
booleandilemma 1y ago
We had a really bad manager join my company recently, and the company has begun to go downhill. Many years ago, this same manager worked for Yahoo. I can't help but feel like this manager is at least partially responsible for Yahoo's downfall, in a sort of butterfly effect way.
neya 1y ago
Whenever Yahoo! comes into discussion, no one talks about the other side of Marissa Mayer, the former CEO who fucked up Yahoo so bad. I had a friend back then who used to tell me how toxic the work culture had become in there. She apparently openly hated men and discriminated against them in the name of empowerment (and subsequently lawsuits were even filed). She was a glorified senior manager from Google basically who had no idea how to run a company. The Tumblr acquisition was proof. Most of the employees had lost faith in her after that acquistion basically. She, on the other hand, took away millions home while everyone who had invested their sweat equity and trusted her even one bit got screwed royally.
- ricardo81 1y ago
  I don't know the finer details of that, but weren't they already travelling towards obscurity by the time she arrived? Yahoo was a defacto entry point into the wider web and as Google gained popularity I think the average web savviness of people meant people had less reasons to arrive at Yahoo. Having a search deal with Google at least guaranteed their relevance for a while.
BinaryIgor 1y ago
Really rare to find a company with such a bad luck, judgement and the cascade of bad decisions; it's strange that after all of that, they're still hanging in there
- RadiozRadioz 1y ago
  Dotcom boom gave them one hell of a momentum
jillesvangurp 1y ago
Yahoo was structured wrong from day 1 to ever be great. At the core, it was a company with an unremarkable product that quickly became irrelevant as search engines took over. A directory of the internet was the naive kind of thing that required little skill or vision. That's what Jerry Wang built. That's what Yahoo was. Good idea at the time. Well executed. But not exactly rocket science. And it had a short shelf life and was soon forgotten. But it had money courtesy of lots of pre-dot com bubble stupid money that investors were flinging around. So it bought things that others had built to grow. And for a while that worked. It had more resources and toys than Google. But over time Google outperformed them on essentially everything it bothered doing. Better search engine, better mail, better news, better video (twice because Google Video was better than Yahoo Video before Youtube dethroned it), etc. These are all areas where Yahoo belatedly tried to gain ground through acquisitions and failed; over and over again. They always came in second or third with essentially anything they touched or tried. By the time Marissa Mayer (ex Google) came in, Google had already won and Yahoo was this big stupid conglomerate of many things that were kind of alright individually but clearly never going to add up to Google. And the rest is history. Marissa Mayer flailed for a few years. There were more acquisitions and a few flopped projects ran by her personally. None of it mattered. In the process, they ran Flickr into the ground. They ran Tumblr into the ground. Etc. They built a well deserved reputation of poor stewards of great stuff that landed in their laps. What they bought was quality. But they couldn't maintain that quality or nurture it. Yahoo is a great story how all the money in the world can't make you a great company if you start out being a mediocre also-ran. If you are running blind, because you have no vision, deals like Google and Facebook will woosh right by you. That's what happened. And arguably, it wouldn't have mattered, because they'd likely have screwed those companies up as well.
- senko 1y ago
  A human-curated directory of the good parts of internet would be worth it's servers weight in gold today. Combine with modern perplexity-style answer engine and it would be far away from "also ran". Yahoo! had 99 problems, but human curation wasn't one.
  - jillesvangurp 1y ago
chris_wot 1y ago
I think their CEOs were obviously why everything went wrong for Yahoo, especially Marissa Mayer.
amelius 1y ago
Yahoo finance is still doing okay, I guess.
jimmydddd 1y ago
And yet Yahoo! is still in the top ten in web traffic.
dr_kretyn 1y ago
Did the author actually explain what went wrong with Yahoo? I mostly read through the thing but didn't learn much.
708145_ 1y ago
How about possibly also failing for being too US centered, basically being an "internet portal" but mainly for the US. Sure Yahoo where _huge_ 2000, but it was never the main goto portal in Scandinavia where I grew up using internet from the mid 90s. Here Altavista was the defacto standard for search until Google replaced. For the portal aspect of Yahoo, there were local alternatives with more relevant material. I don't see that Yahoo ever succeeded globally.
ksec 1y ago
Every now and then, and especially in the past 3 - 4 years I really want to recreate Yahoo, or a curated Web Directory. Bring back the small Web, and a small gif for all webpage saying they are featured on yahoo. 95% of today's Web site are now complete garbage. And with AI written content I wont be surprised if this is now closer to 98%.
scarface_74 1y ago
What’s ironic is that during all they time period and even today it’s still one of the top trafficked website. https://www.semrush.com/website/top/ https://www.semrush.com/website/top/ Other companies would kill for Yahoo’s traffic
mathattack 1y ago
Could the issue be that they went from technical founder to spreadsheet leadership without having a hyper-competitive visionary? It’s seems like they had plenty of genius and adults in the room, but no hyper-competitive Musk/Zuck/Ellison/Jobs/Gates.
mrkramer 1y ago
>in 2008, Microsoft offered $44.6 billion to acquire Yahoo. Steve Ballmer was even more crazier than I thought.
- triceratops 1y ago
  I can't tell who was crazier in that deal. Ballmer or whoever was in charge on the Yahoo side that turned him down.
npalli 1y ago
Instead of saying what went wrong for Yahoo (default state and expectation), it is worthwhile noting everything that went right for Google and Meta. Alternate theories don't amount to any insight apart from hindsight is 20/20.

"In 1998, Yahoo turned down the opportunity to acquire Google for $1 million."

unit149 1y ago
[dead]
jeffbee 1y ago
Sure, but Google is not inflating due to a cosmological constant. If Yahoo had acquired Google, Google would now be worthless, not a trillion-dollar company.
- rNULLED 1y ago
  what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?
  - dvh 1y ago
    From falsehood, anything follows. (I'm implying here that you don't have unstoppable force and you don't have immovable object)
    - DonHopkins 1y ago
      If your grandmother had wheels, then she's be a bicycle.
    - iluvlawyering 1y ago
      From contradiction, non-contradiction.
  - kstrauser 1y ago
    MSN.
    - gscott 1y ago
      I like how MSN manages to pack so much content onto a single page—it’s surprisingly intuitive. I’m not sure why that kind of formatting isn’t more common.
  - iluvlawyering 1y ago
    A deflection.
- bborud 1y ago
  Exactly. Don't forget that Yahoo bought three search engines. (Full disclosure: I worked for one of the companies they acquired).
- baal80spam 1y ago
  > Google is not inflating due to a cosmological constant Well put!

I am reminded of LICRA v. Yahoo. Another puzzling choice of Yahoo's that seems very wrong in hindsight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LICRA_v._Yahoo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LICRA_v._Yahoo!

thunderbong 1y ago

> In 1998, Yahoo turned down the opportunity to acquire Google for $1 million. Yahoo made six acquisitions that year, spending $107.3 million. > In 2002, Google offered to sell again for $1 billion. Yahoo hesitated and Google raised its price to $3 billion. Yahoo declined at the higher price. Google went on to become a trillion dollar company. > Yahoo attempted to acquire Facebook for $1 billion in 2006, but Mark Zuckerberg turned down the offer. Had Yahoo increased its offer by just $100 million, Facebook’s board would have forced Zuckerberg to take it. Facebook also became a trillion dollar company. In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo.

jeffbee 1y ago
> In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo. Yeah exactly. Also I would consider the Overture acquisition extremely successful because their patent lawsuit v. Google gave them 8% of Google pre-IPO. If held (which it was not), that is a substantial asset today.
- arresin 1y ago
  They had 8% of Google at one point and sold it?!
- jll29 1y ago
  You are spot on, but you are drawing a slightly wrong conclusion, IMHO: Yes, Overture what the best Yahoo! acquisition ever made. But Yahoo!'s greatest mistake was to settle the Google lawsuit for a few million dollars - which meant that Google could keep using Overture's (parented) invention of keyword bidding based advertising; without it, Google may never have found a way to become profitable. So Yahoo! bought its own gravestone for $50m, when all they would have had to do is stand firm and go to trial. If Y! exercised its government-awarded monopoly rights for keyword auction based advertising, there may still be that Y! portal that was so prominent in the early 2000s. PS: Yahoo Inc. is not full gone - Yahoo Japan remains the last independent part of the former Y! - see https://www.yahoo.co.jp https://www.yahoo.co.jp .

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

nertzy 1y ago

I am still a Yahoo! pinger as well. ~ ping yahoo.com PING yahoo.com (74.6.231.20): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 74.6.231.20: icmp_seq=0 ttl=50 time=42.366 ms ^C --- yahoo.com ping statistics --- 1 packets transmitted, 1 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 42.366/42.366/42.366/0.000 ms

oreilles 1y ago
I just tried, pinging Yahoo is about 20 times slower than pinging Google...
- firefax 1y ago
  I decided to run a small experiment ping -c 20 -i 5 google.com; ping -c 20 -i 5 yahoo.com [snip] --- google.com ping statistics --- 20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 14.746/19.939/25.057/3.153 ms [snip] --- yahoo.com ping statistics --- 20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 14.561/20.883/25.080/2.675 ms They look comparable to me?
  - theshackleford 1y ago
    It would depend on where you are pinging from and if they have anything closer to you to respond. From where I am, google averages 4ms, yahoo is at 200ms+. Obviously because they dont have the money or marketshare to bother putting anything for me to route closer too.
  - jedberg 1y ago
    Same experiment from my gigabit link in Silicon Valley. Looks like Yahoo is about 3 times slower but far more consistent --- google.com ping statistics --- 20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 6.918/23.419/294.037/62.272 ms --- yahoo.com ping statistics --- 20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 78.056/78.940/80.940/0.811 ms Although what's interesting is that Yahoo is really more like 10 times slower (almost every ping was in the 6-8ms range), it's just that there was just that one packet at 300ms and other at 30ms that really blew out the average.

econ 1y ago

I wasn't there but from talking with people working there it was a culture of waiting for the next paycheck and staying under the radar, not caring and not doing much work. Some 20-30 people I chat with were all the kind you should immediately fire and escort out of the building. Some had their next job lined up already just in case. lol

jjbinx007 1y ago

It was only just over a decade ago I used to play lots of the online games hosted on Yahoo and it was great! I had just started dating my (now) wife and we used to hang out every evening in an online video conference and play online versions of Pool, Risk etc, and as it was all inside Yahoo's ecosystem we only had to login once and we could automatically play each other. Going further back, Yahoo's web directory was also a good and fun way to explore the world wide web. When Google appeared, and its search was so good, the concept of "people don't need bookmarks any more" seemed to spread, but in the process the joy of discovery was lost. Rather like how browsing DVDs in Blockbuster means you could find something really cool by accident, but searching a database means you have to have an idea what you want to find to begin with.

zippyman55 1y ago

To me, Yahoo always seemed more trustworthy than Google or Facebook.

distances 1y ago
I started using Internet actively around 1996 or so. For me Yahoo practically didn't even exist, their homepage was a hodgepodge of everything and I couldn't figure out why I would go there. My search usage was mainly AltaVista with some HotBot, Northern Light, and Raging Search mixed in. But never Yahoo.
- mrkramer 1y ago
  Yahoo wanted to be internet's hotspot for everything....ironically enough Google become that despite the fact that they rose to power because of their minimalism and search focus.

mkagenius 1y ago

Just checked Marissa Mayer's X account, can someone explain why is her account not getting enough views/reach - https://x.com/marissamayer https://x.com/marissamayer She apparently has 1.4M followers with barely 20 likes. This was even worse a few months back. Are those followers bought / dormant? Or is twitter suppressing it?

jeffbee 1y ago
Nobody currently uses Twitter so follower count implies nothing. Lots of notorious figures have posted regarding how they get the same interaction rate on Bluesky even though they supposedly have 10x or even 1000x more followers on Twitter. For example: https://bsky.app/profile/brandonfriedman.bsky.social/post/3lu7adqjhvk27 https://bsky.app/profile/brandonfriedman.bsky.social/post/3l...
add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
It's a ghost town for anything substantive, if she's not shouting about culture war stuff she's not likely to get much engagement.
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  > It's a ghost town for anything substantive It always was. Twitter delenda est is a meme for a reason.
eastbound 1y ago
I can’t, but influence is bought and temporary. People aren’t found off the person, but what she represents in society. And since she spent 8 years buried at Yahoo!, busy executing the winddown plan (masterfully), she may have inadvertently communicated that she’s expert in liquidation. Not something you follow when you want to know what the future is. (Insert a distasteful joke about how she would have made a killing at DOGE).
blitzar 1y ago
Twitter is all bots.
1y ago

drewg123 1y ago

I do miss them being one of the biggest FreeBSD contributors. For a long time in the late 90s / early 2000s Yahoo was to FreeBSD what Netflix is now (and maybe a bit more). They used to host a lot of the FreeBSD build/test infrastructure and employed several src committers and they contributed heavily to a LOT of work that has made FreeBSD a viable OS going forward. For example, they contributed heavily to the SMPng project (which made FreeBSD into a modern, multi-theaded kernel with fine grained locking). They even hosted the kickoff meeting: https://people.freebsd.org/~fsmp/SMP/SMPmeeting.html https://people.freebsd.org/~fsmp/SMP/SMPmeeting.html They employed Peter Wemm, who did the majority of the work for the AMD64 (eg, x86-64) port. And lots that I'm forgetting about probably..

chris_j 1y ago
What happened? Did they stop using FreeBSD? Did they continue to use it but jsut stop contributing?
- otterley 1y ago
  Yes, we migrated over to Linux for a number of reasons, among them 1/higher developer mindshare, and 2/Linux had better SMP performance for the first decade or so vs. FreeBSD as we started to buy beefier multi-core and multi-socket servers.
  - ksec 1y ago
    I thought it was Marisa Meyer that forced the change?
    - otterley 1y ago
      No, this process began long before she joined the company.
      - ksec 1y ago
        Sigh. I often think an erosion of tech stack also brings erosion of company culture and value.

russellbeattie 1y ago

As a ex-Yahoo! from 20 years ago, I have a very clear opinion about the downfall of the company: Yahoo! had spent years structuring itself as a "media" company - not a technology company - but nonsensically, it also wanted to be Google. Yes, Yahoo! had parts of the company that were extremely technologically advanced, but they hired Hollywood execs and MBAs to run the company through the 2000s - people who had no real technological vision at all. Yahoo!'s greatest strength and primary role in the Internet could be summarized as this: It was the most useful site on the web. Users relied on it for their start page, email, finance, weather, news, sports, maps, casual multiplayer games, forums, instant messaging, answers, fantasy sports, evites, photos, and an amazing amount of search traffic. It was a one-stop shop for everything you needed online. Maybe not the best in every area, but always pretty good. You know how Google starts and kills products constantly? Yahoo! rarely did that. It saw interesting business models, copied them or bought into them and kept them going and users loved them for it. And all of this was profitable, just not Google-level profits. Remember Jack Welch's mantra of GE not having to be number one in every market as long as they were number two or three and were profitable? At one point, this was Yahoo! and they could have remained relevant to this day had they embraced this role. But the company's divisions were siloed and competed against each other in a way that makes Microsoft machiavellianism seem like a Sunday picnic. And the leadership was obsessed with Google and wanted to outdo them, even though they had a completely different culture and mindset. It was never going to happen. Regardless, they ignored Yahoo!'s bread and butter services, confused their employees and customers, and generally ran the company into the ground. Yahoo! needed strong leadership that understood the company's strengths and built on them to continue to be useful to web users. Sadly, that never happened.

dh2022 1y ago
Besides HN, Yahoo is still my only other news portal. (Yes, I am that old.)
thijson 1y ago
I remember in the late 90's switching from yahoo to google because google's search results were better. I also set my homepage to google because the homepage was so fast to load, it wasn't all cluttered up like the yahoo homepage. I remember when I saw google for the first time, it was while searching for stuff on the redhat website, and I saw the Gooooogle at the bottom. I guess google had indexed the website for them. That led me to check out the google web site itself. I think at some point that google was indexing the web for yahoo, I could be wrong though.

hshshshshsh 1y ago

Everyone is a genius writing what went wrong but never have the guts to short it as it unfolds.

WA 1y ago
I agree and would’ve written the same several years ago. Unfortunately, shorting is expensive and you have to get the timing right, too, not only the direction of the stock. If you’re early when shorting, you’re still wrong.
- mixmastamyk 1y ago
  Also a slow decline is not lucrative enough in comparison to the risk.
LarMachinarum 1y ago
In all fairness, that really stands to reason: retrospective analysis is enormously much easier, more precise and less risky than prediction, for the simple reason that after the fact (especially this long and with lots of inside people having spoken up since), there is enormously more data available than before it went downhill. So it's much less a question of having guts than of having access to sufficient data to see enough of the whole picture.

figital 1y ago

del.icio.us was my favorite tool on the internet for a few years (perhaps even still in retrospect). And not far off from the same functionality as Facebook (today). Why purchase such a thing to shut it down? Money which needed to be burned I guess (for accounting tricks).

can16358p 1y ago

Yahoo literally did every wrong move and turned every move that could make it become successful again down, almost as if it deliberate. I can't believe it still exists.

reacweb 1y ago

I think that Marissa Meyer had given yahoo back a bit of its lustre. That meant cutting dividends in favour of investment. Restoring a reputation takes time. I stopped taking an interest when she was ousted by impatient shareholders. I am not an insider, maybe I am wrong.

drysart 1y ago
She wasn't ousted because shareholders were impatient. She was ousted because under her leadership Yahoo had collapsed to the point that the only thing left to do was to sell it. When a new CEO is brought in to right a sinking ship (which Yahoo very much was at the time of her hiring), their number one responsibility is to have a solid core strategy based in leveraging the company's existing strengths and then execute competently on it. She had no solid core strategy. Her strategy at Yahoo, as she described it, was "to throw lots of spaghetti at the purple walls and see what sticks"; which is exactly what she needed to not be doing. She blew a lot of money on a lot of very varied things and ended up with lots of expensive puzzle pieces with no plan for how to fit them all together into something that would stop Yahoo's bleeding. At the end, the company as a whole had a valuation less than the company's Alibaba investment -- she drove Yahoo not just to zero, but past zero; and that's 100% due to her not understanding how to lead a shrinking company.
- sfblah 1y ago
  This is basically correct.

nubinetwork 1y ago

Yahoo is still quite popular in Japan.

nbf_1995 1y ago
Yahoo Japan is a different company to Yahoo.
- Capricorn2481 1y ago
  Yahoo itself is still used more than almost any site on the web. Including TikTok https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites How much of that is people not noticing it's their default browser page? Idk
esafak 1y ago
Does the Japanese Web still sport a 90s aesthetic? That would explain it.

HardCodedBias 1y ago

I think Yahoo faded into irrelevance since it viewed itself as a media company and not a technology company. Many internet companies fancied themselves media companies in the 1990s and 2000s. They all are on the scrap heap now, some examples: AOL, Yahoo, Excite@Home, Lycos, iVillage, About.com. The companies of the time that fancied themselves technology/infra/logistics did well: Google, Amazon, eBay/PayPal, Salesforce, Akamai, DoubleClick. Of course any lists like this have selection bias, so maybe I am wrong.

GCA10 1y ago

Yahoo did have a unique ability to smother any business that it acquired -- and I think the reasons go way beyond an inability to monetize them. In fact, I'd argue that it was actually Yahoo's fixation with short-term monetization strategies that eventually turned everything to dust. Consider Flickr, which Yahoo bought for about $25 million in 2005. If you're a tech visionary, you look at this popular little photo-sharing site and say: "Wow, everyone's connectivity speeds are soaring, and we could morph this into a video site, too!" And then, maybe, you've invented YouTube. Or, you look at the way Friendstr and Facebook are getting traction, and you say: "Wow, what if we built out easier commenting and a social-network feed with abundant sharing of popular photos among users' pals?" And then maybe you've invented Instagram. But Yahoo's metrics-driven managers refused to stretch their brains in this direction. I've been told by two famous-name insiders at the time that Yahoo's approach to everything was to set short-term targets focused on existing metrics, with rigid focus on hitting quarterly targets. It was all about driving orderly growth of what was already there, rather than any desire to explore new and uncharted areas. In essence, Yahoo had a Silicon Valley address but a Battle Creek, Mich., mindset. Purple logo aside, Yahoo owed a lot more to the way W.W. Kellogg had been running its cereal business for decades, as opposed to anything going on in the 650 area code.

bsder 1y ago
>And then, maybe, you've invented YouTube. SUPER unlikely. Everybody forgets that YouTube was a massive money loser that was floated by VC money. Had Google not bought YouTube, it was doomed.
- everfrustrated 1y ago
  Youtube was also going to get buried under lawsuits for copyright infringement. Being part of a big brand gave them a lot of legal cover.
- GCA10 1y ago
  That's actually the point. Yahoo in 2005 had the financial muscle -- and an interesting starting point via Flickr's user base -- to spin up its own version of YouTube without needing to do an acquisition. Stronger Yahoo leadership would have stomached the get-started costs of an internal build-out, because of a sense of what this could become. Yahoo just lacked the imagination and nerve necessary to see how its own assets could lead to the next big thing.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

katzgrau 1y ago

As a Y! employee for a couple of years - although my time was brief, I can say with confidence that had Yahoo successfully acquired Google or Facebook, both would have been destroyed in short order.

NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
Yes, but that just makes me wish it had happened...
- mixmastamyk 1y ago
  Wish they’d been bought by MS, probably would have sidelined them. Was a really bad deal from memory.
  - rasz 1y ago
    Nobody can beat Yahoo in making bad deals. Lets not forget they made Mark Cuban a billionaire with a legendary Broadcast.com acquisition at $10K per user! $5.7 billion dollars written off in less than two years.

WarOnPrivacy 1y ago

Another football in the Verizon Yahoo/Shuffle are those Verizon customers who were sold to Frontier but had verizon.net email addresses. Verizon kept control of those lightly-maintained email accounts and pushed them into the Yahoo/AOL infrastructure. Users with a verizon.net email address had webmail access at mail.aol.com. Verizon didn't make life easy. They changed POP/IMAP/SMTP servers every year or so. Just this May they changed again, from smtp.mail.yahoo.com to smtp.verizon.net - but the old servers still worked until the AOL outage 2 days ago. During the years in between, customers got caught between AOL's mandate to use OAuth and Microsoft's refusal to support it in Outlook. FF to now-ish and Verizon is purchasing those same FiOS customers back again. One more smack with the Verizon ping-ping paddle.

sanex 1y ago
Customers who had sbcglobal and att email addresses ended up using Yahoo for email, which I always found ironic.
ciabattabread 1y ago
> but the old servers still worked until the AOL outage 2 days ago. So that explains why my dad's email suddenly couldn't send outgoing messages (the configuration, for years, was outgoing.yahoo.verizon.net with normal password). After what felt like an hour, what worked was changing it to smtp.mail.yahoo.com and using OAuth.
qingcharles 1y ago
It has caused no end of trouble for older folks who are still using yahoo.com and aol.com and sbcglobal email addresses who can't get any sort of sane support and are having a nightmare time getting into their email accounts that are linked to everything they've signed up for in the last 30 years.

DmitryOlshansky 1y ago

I recall the Zookeeper paper from Yahoo scientist which basically details a more useful version of Google’s chubby. I find reliability and design of Zookeeper fascinating these days cool kids use etcd mostly because of relatively complex protocol of Zookeeper (there is a few implementations but they lack the polish of Java client).

gethly 1y ago
iirc problem of the zookeeper was that it was a chunky java application. etcd is tiny go binary. so there is more to it than just complexity of the protocol itself.
zX41ZdbW 1y ago
There is a drop-in, protocol-compatible replacement for ZooKeeper - ClickHouse Keeper: https://clickhouse.com/clickhouse/keeper https://clickhouse.com/clickhouse/keeper Many applications depend on ZooKeeper's data model and client libraries, and can't switch to etcd. Things like watches and ephemeral nodes are different there.

JLO64 1y ago

Does anyone have a good book recommendation on Yahoo? I’d love to read more on the people who ran it into the ground.

ogou 1y ago

An underreported part of the Yahoo story is its relationship to India. I worked there during the Verizon years and heard the history. Yahoo was a forerunner of the "offshoring" of technology jobs to India. It moved lots of core operations to a small army of engineers there. They figured out that their American counterparts made substantially more money than they did, especially the middle managers. Waves of Indian employees began moving to Santa Clara and getting market rate wages. Suddenly, Yahoo wasn't saving as much money as they used to. I don't think it was a major factor in its overall financial decline, but it had some effect I'm sure. On a side note, I heard a couple of Indian engineers say they were moving back to raise their kids because they didn't like the cultural influences in our schools. There were many interesting lunchtime conversations about things like that.

lifestyleguru 1y ago
> On a side note, I heard a couple of Indian engineers say they were moving back to raise their kids because they didn't like the cultural influences in our school They didn't like the cultural influences by a culture which advanced their life prosperity so they relocate their children back to the culture where they will have to learn everything again by themselves.

andy_ppp 1y ago

I think the issue was the people running it were the type of people who are taught to ruthlessly look at a spreadsheet and decide if Coca Cola can invest X in marketing and product development they can expect to get Y back (with reasonable accuracy). Of course with software small teams can do big things so these calculations are almost impossible. Investing a billion dollars in your search engine in ~2008 might be considered insane of course. We were told by Carol Bartz at an all hands that they had done the work on their spreadsheets and they could not compete with the investment Microsoft and Google were planning. It still annoys me to this day that there was no discussion or attempt to decide if the engineers and the company were up for the challenge with Google, even with less money. I'm not saying Yahoo! would have won, but to not even have bothered trying still irritates me - where is your vision? where is your fight? Anyway this is my take on it, the management decided to just give up on being technically excellent and even being a software company at some point. The mind boggles why you would do this while software was eating the world and you had loads of fantastic engineering talent...

jackdawipper 1y ago

First Yahoo did Yahoo Serious, then Yahoo got did

calmbonsai 1y ago

In summary, decades of failed leadership resulting in zero corporate focus. They're the epitome of a corporate melange of services and products that resulted in far, far less than the sum of its parts.

reilly3000 1y ago

In an odd turn of events I have ben one a regular user of Yahoo! despite how terrible the experience and content is. It shipped as a Safari default years and years ago and has remained in my neglected Safari bookmarks for no particular reason. I’ve recently reverted to using Safari on iPhone as my default mobile browser and used to rely on my recently used tabs for a quick dopamine hit. Several months ago Apple removed that from the new tab experience, putting my bookmarks front and center. So I use Yahoo. It’s mostly clickbait content, heavily monetized, with all of the excrement of 20 years of AdTech on display. Ads routinely load in the wrong unit size, or with a double quote character that breaks the sticky container making it impossible to view the next page of comments. Most often the ads are mobile redirects that just crash the page and lose your scroll position. It’s really a terrible experience to behold. At least I don’t use social media.

drcode 1y ago

I feel like the correct, boring answer is "they didn't focus on getting people the best website for what they were searching for"

dehrmann 1y ago

This doesn't actually answer what went wrong for Yahoo!. The main insight is that Yahoo! saw that it made money from traffic, so it bought traffic generators without regard for if the traffic could be profitable. I buy this argument, but Yahoo!'s problem was people stopped going to Yahoo!, and none of its acquisitions were big enough to offset that.

esafak 1y ago
So you're saying their traffic generation did not work.

sdrothrock 1y ago

I wonder what went right with Yahoo Japan, and how it was so successful here that it's still a mainstay for many to this day Related post I saw an hour after writing this: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/edmund-ho-1277b2125_yahoo-japan-activity-7351162746920452096-LU3A https://www.linkedin.com/posts/edmund-ho-1277b2125_yahoo-jap...

jongjong 1y ago

I wonder how much macroeconomics and politics had to do with Yahoo's situation. During this period, the US had been exporting large amounts of dollars to foreign investors (US going into deficit) and these foreign investors didn't know what to do with all those dollars so they dumped them onto the US stock market. This has been going on for decades. It was the premise of the Japan carry trade. US companies like Google or Facebook would have had access to plenty of capital during this time and maybe it allowed them to be picky.

kocial 1y ago

People blaming the acquisition failure by/from Yahoo for the downfall are misinformed. The reason for Yahoo's failure was its loss of dominance in search to the Chrome Browser. Google's few actions made Google what it is today, and that starts with a few most critical: - Launch of browser ( Chrome browser ). It didn't even become a meme against Internet Explorer, but also defeated Mozilla Firefox in its own game. - Acquisition of YouTube. - Acquisition of Android. They are already doing other crazy innovation that makes them dominate the Industry. While Yahoo was only famous for - Yahoo Answers ( Quora took over that ), - Yahoo Mail ( Gmail took over that ), - Yahoo Chat ( the golden days ), and this one - Yahoo failed to capitalise with the change of ERA, WhatsApp would have never succeeded, if Yahoo had innovated its chat and entered the Mobile app segment.

michaelt 1y ago
> The reason for Yahoo's failure was its loss of dominance in search to the Chrome Browser. I'm afraid your timeline might be a bit off there. Yahoo outsourced their search to Google in 2000 [1] while google didn't buy android until ~2005 and chrome didn't come out until ~2008 [2]. And before google, yahoo had outsourced to 'Inktomi' and before that IIRC to 'Altavista' Yahoo wasn't even trying to compete in search. This was the era of companies like "AOL Time Warner" where people thought web portals were media companies, and company bosses spooked by the dot-com crash were trying to diversify into tangible assets. [1] https://www.wired.com/2000/06/yahoo-goes-gaga-for-google/ https://www.wired.com/2000/06/yahoo-goes-gaga-for-google/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome
- lelanthran 1y ago
  > And before google, yahoo had outsourced to 'Inktomi' and before that IIRC to 'Altavista' > Yahoo wasn't even trying to compete in search. Yeah. This is a common MBA-ism: focus on the top of the value chain where the largest margin exists. The theory itself is actually not wrong, TBH; it's just that Yahoo misidentified where the top of the value chain lay. They thought the top of the value chain was the users, and that sponsered content was the product. Google correctly identified the users as the product and the advertisers as the top of the value chain. IOW, Yahoo sold curated content (product) to users (customers). Google sold users (product) to the advertisers (customers). To Yahoo, the people visiting their site was the top of the value chain if you're directly pitching products to those users!

maltelandwehr 1y ago

I do not think it was just the bad acquisitions. Yahoo also turned from a tech company into a media company. At some point, every decision was made with a media company mindset. This includes making decisions that prioritize short-term revenue over building growth loops or enhancing user retention. Also, no investments into technology. Browser, CDN, proper web hosting, cloud - they missed everything.

jaza 1y ago

I miss Yahoo Games. My favourite was dominoes, many hours spent in there as a teenager. The only Yahoo thing I've accessed for the past decade or so is Finance, the stock price info and the investing news seems to still be reasonable.

farazbabar 1y ago

I interviewed at yahoo during the tenure of Marissa Meyer and decided not to join after noticing a strange lack of diversity in my interviewers (I saw a similar lack of diversity at Apple Pay much more recently), anytime top level organizations become infested by monocultures, it becomes impossible for progress, new ideas and innovation to take foot. It doesn’t matter which clique or group has infected the organization by giving priority to conformity over diversity, it all ends the same way. This is not a call for institutional DEI, this is about being on the lookout for monocultures in innovative organizations.

booleandilemma 1y ago

We had a really bad manager join my company recently, and the company has begun to go downhill. Many years ago, this same manager worked for Yahoo. I can't help but feel like this manager is at least partially responsible for Yahoo's downfall, in a sort of butterfly effect way.

neya 1y ago

Whenever Yahoo! comes into discussion, no one talks about the other side of Marissa Mayer, the former CEO who fucked up Yahoo so bad. I had a friend back then who used to tell me how toxic the work culture had become in there. She apparently openly hated men and discriminated against them in the name of empowerment (and subsequently lawsuits were even filed). She was a glorified senior manager from Google basically who had no idea how to run a company. The Tumblr acquisition was proof. Most of the employees had lost faith in her after that acquistion basically. She, on the other hand, took away millions home while everyone who had invested their sweat equity and trusted her even one bit got screwed royally.

ricardo81 1y ago
I don't know the finer details of that, but weren't they already travelling towards obscurity by the time she arrived? Yahoo was a defacto entry point into the wider web and as Google gained popularity I think the average web savviness of people meant people had less reasons to arrive at Yahoo. Having a search deal with Google at least guaranteed their relevance for a while.

BinaryIgor 1y ago

Really rare to find a company with such a bad luck, judgement and the cascade of bad decisions; it's strange that after all of that, they're still hanging in there

RadiozRadioz 1y ago
Dotcom boom gave them one hell of a momentum

jillesvangurp 1y ago

Yahoo was structured wrong from day 1 to ever be great. At the core, it was a company with an unremarkable product that quickly became irrelevant as search engines took over. A directory of the internet was the naive kind of thing that required little skill or vision. That's what Jerry Wang built. That's what Yahoo was. Good idea at the time. Well executed. But not exactly rocket science. And it had a short shelf life and was soon forgotten. But it had money courtesy of lots of pre-dot com bubble stupid money that investors were flinging around. So it bought things that others had built to grow. And for a while that worked. It had more resources and toys than Google. But over time Google outperformed them on essentially everything it bothered doing. Better search engine, better mail, better news, better video (twice because Google Video was better than Yahoo Video before Youtube dethroned it), etc. These are all areas where Yahoo belatedly tried to gain ground through acquisitions and failed; over and over again. They always came in second or third with essentially anything they touched or tried. By the time Marissa Mayer (ex Google) came in, Google had already won and Yahoo was this big stupid conglomerate of many things that were kind of alright individually but clearly never going to add up to Google. And the rest is history. Marissa Mayer flailed for a few years. There were more acquisitions and a few flopped projects ran by her personally. None of it mattered. In the process, they ran Flickr into the ground. They ran Tumblr into the ground. Etc. They built a well deserved reputation of poor stewards of great stuff that landed in their laps. What they bought was quality. But they couldn't maintain that quality or nurture it. Yahoo is a great story how all the money in the world can't make you a great company if you start out being a mediocre also-ran. If you are running blind, because you have no vision, deals like Google and Facebook will woosh right by you. That's what happened. And arguably, it wouldn't have mattered, because they'd likely have screwed those companies up as well.

senko 1y ago
A human-curated directory of the good parts of internet would be worth it's servers weight in gold today. Combine with modern perplexity-style answer engine and it would be far away from "also ran". Yahoo! had 99 problems, but human curation wasn't one.
- jillesvangurp 1y ago

chris_wot 1y ago

I think their CEOs were obviously why everything went wrong for Yahoo, especially Marissa Mayer.

amelius 1y ago

Yahoo finance is still doing okay, I guess.

jimmydddd 1y ago

And yet Yahoo! is still in the top ten in web traffic.

dr_kretyn 1y ago

Did the author actually explain what went wrong with Yahoo? I mostly read through the thing but didn't learn much.

708145_ 1y ago

How about possibly also failing for being too US centered, basically being an "internet portal" but mainly for the US. Sure Yahoo where _huge_ 2000, but it was never the main goto portal in Scandinavia where I grew up using internet from the mid 90s. Here Altavista was the defacto standard for search until Google replaced. For the portal aspect of Yahoo, there were local alternatives with more relevant material. I don't see that Yahoo ever succeeded globally.

ksec 1y ago

Every now and then, and especially in the past 3 - 4 years I really want to recreate Yahoo, or a curated Web Directory. Bring back the small Web, and a small gif for all webpage saying they are featured on yahoo. 95% of today's Web site are now complete garbage. And with AI written content I wont be surprised if this is now closer to 98%.

scarface_74 1y ago

What’s ironic is that during all they time period and even today it’s still one of the top trafficked website. https://www.semrush.com/website/top/ https://www.semrush.com/website/top/ Other companies would kill for Yahoo’s traffic

mathattack 1y ago

Could the issue be that they went from technical founder to spreadsheet leadership without having a hyper-competitive visionary? It’s seems like they had plenty of genius and adults in the room, but no hyper-competitive Musk/Zuck/Ellison/Jobs/Gates.

mrkramer 1y ago

>in 2008, Microsoft offered $44.6 billion to acquire Yahoo. Steve Ballmer was even more crazier than I thought.

triceratops 1y ago
I can't tell who was crazier in that deal. Ballmer or whoever was in charge on the Yahoo side that turned him down.

npalli 1y ago

Instead of saying what went wrong for Yahoo (default state and expectation), it is worthwhile noting everything that went right for Google and Meta. Alternate theories don't amount to any insight apart from hindsight is 20/20.