5 ms·

Stop over-analyzing things. Saying Yahoo made this acquisition for the sake of publicity is an extraordinary claim which is completely unsubstantiated.

jjoonathan 14y ago
I'll probably have lost my knee-jerk enthusiasm by tomorrow, but I'm not ready to back down from my opinion quite yet. The parent post resonated with me because it made me realize that, in just the past few hours, I had already overheard / participated in three separate conversations with nontechnical people regarding the acquisition. In one of those conversations, someone expressed a desire to check out the app. I can't remember the last time a non-apple product hit that level of visibility. In my neck of the woods (obviously not a representative statistical sample of anything) this story achieved something extraordinary for yahoo, and if it generalizes at anywhere near the same level of effectiveness I could easily believe that it was worth the money. I'm sure that a significant portion of the acquisition price came from the quality of the app as opposed to publicity (it IS a great app), but I simply don't believe that Yahoo AND Summly didn't know/care about the publicity potential, and by extension I believe it impacted the purchase decision and pricing.
- alaskamiller 14y ago
  Yahoo has a long history of throwing a metric ton of money at shiny things. This doesn't make Yahoo any cooler. See: broadcast.com ($5.7B), delicious ($20MM), MyBlogLog, then some Middle Eastern social network Maktoob ($167MM) that then disappeared soon after.
  - petercooper 14y ago
    To be fair, Delicious was a bargain that was hugely loved and heavily used by its userbase. The rest, however..
    - clebio 14y ago
      'was'?
      - petercooper 14y ago
        I can't speak for it now, but it certainly was at the time. "Was" does not necessarily mean there was a cessation, merely that said state was true at an earlier time. FWIW though, I was a huge fan at the time and it went majorly downhill after it was sold to Yahoo. I don't know how it is with the new owners, because I moved away.
      - clebio 14y ago
        Replying here, because for some reason can't reply to your child comment. I still use Delicious for all my book-marking. For a time, it looked like it would get killed off, but that didn't happen. I'd be interested to know what anyone else uses, but Delicious.com still works fine for me.
        skateinmars 14y ago
        I recently moved to diigo after staying with delicious for about 6 years and being disappointed by the lack of "vision" in the future of the product. Diigo feels like what delicious would have been if yahoo didn't stop improving it, it is fast, simple to use and the browser extension for firefox is okay (which is more than I can say about the delicious one). Had diigo been unsatisfying for me, I would have likely moved to pinboard which is I think quite popular in the HN crowd.
        petercooper 14y ago
        I guess I was a 'power' Delicious user with several thousand links and.. I switched to a giant text file synced over Dropbox between all my machines and a Ruby script to manage and search it. All I lose are the social features, which I never used anyway (although I remember when del.icio.us/popular was my go-to site for links in the way HN and Reddit are now).
  - iso8859-1 14y ago
    Maktoob didn't disappear: www.maktoob.com
nilkn 14y ago
That's not an extraordinary claim at all. It's called marketing. Companies spend millions on it all the time. And it's far from "completely unsubstantiated." Summly was objectively not very good, and the developer appears to have more family connections than he does raw engineering talent. Yahoo! has tons of talented engineers working for them who could have easily put together another shoddy summarization app (except Yahoo! isn't even using the app--they're shutting it down). Why would they dish out (reportedly) $30 million for a kid who hasn't even graduated from high school?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
  - rdouble 14y ago
    that's not really how it works
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- argonaut 14y ago
  Your logic: It's not option 1 or 2 (statement is unsubstantiated - when you say it "was objectively not very good," you really mean "in my opinion it was not very good"). So it must be option 3 (also unsubstantiated), since option 3 is the only option left (unsubstantiated). To answer your last question: 1) As far as I know that kid did not hold any high-ranking role at the company anymore; the talent probably lay elsewhere. 2) There are many reasons and unless your name begins with Marissa and ends with Mayer, you cannot know for sure.
metaphorm 14y ago
I think I agree with that claim actually. Yahoo's biggest deficit is not a lack of news summarizing apps, and is not a lack of engineering talent. Its deficit is a shitty reputation as a has-been company that is uninteresting to dynamic young talent. I very much think they bought themselves a boy wonder so they could show him off to the press. I doubt the company actually needs him or his product in any direct sense.

jjoonathan 14y ago

I'll probably have lost my knee-jerk enthusiasm by tomorrow, but I'm not ready to back down from my opinion quite yet. The parent post resonated with me because it made me realize that, in just the past few hours, I had already overheard / participated in three separate conversations with nontechnical people regarding the acquisition. In one of those conversations, someone expressed a desire to check out the app. I can't remember the last time a non-apple product hit that level of visibility. In my neck of the woods (obviously not a representative statistical sample of anything) this story achieved something extraordinary for yahoo, and if it generalizes at anywhere near the same level of effectiveness I could easily believe that it was worth the money. I'm sure that a significant portion of the acquisition price came from the quality of the app as opposed to publicity (it IS a great app), but I simply don't believe that Yahoo AND Summly didn't know/care about the publicity potential, and by extension I believe it impacted the purchase decision and pricing.

alaskamiller 14y ago
Yahoo has a long history of throwing a metric ton of money at shiny things. This doesn't make Yahoo any cooler. See: broadcast.com ($5.7B), delicious ($20MM), MyBlogLog, then some Middle Eastern social network Maktoob ($167MM) that then disappeared soon after.
- petercooper 14y ago
  To be fair, Delicious was a bargain that was hugely loved and heavily used by its userbase. The rest, however..
  - clebio 14y ago
    'was'?
    - petercooper 14y ago
      I can't speak for it now, but it certainly was at the time. "Was" does not necessarily mean there was a cessation, merely that said state was true at an earlier time. FWIW though, I was a huge fan at the time and it went majorly downhill after it was sold to Yahoo. I don't know how it is with the new owners, because I moved away.
    - clebio 14y ago
      Replying here, because for some reason can't reply to your child comment. I still use Delicious for all my book-marking. For a time, it looked like it would get killed off, but that didn't happen. I'd be interested to know what anyone else uses, but Delicious.com still works fine for me.
      - skateinmars 14y ago
        I recently moved to diigo after staying with delicious for about 6 years and being disappointed by the lack of "vision" in the future of the product. Diigo feels like what delicious would have been if yahoo didn't stop improving it, it is fast, simple to use and the browser extension for firefox is okay (which is more than I can say about the delicious one). Had diigo been unsatisfying for me, I would have likely moved to pinboard which is I think quite popular in the HN crowd.
      - petercooper 14y ago
        I guess I was a 'power' Delicious user with several thousand links and.. I switched to a giant text file synced over Dropbox between all my machines and a Ruby script to manage and search it. All I lose are the social features, which I never used anyway (although I remember when del.icio.us/popular was my go-to site for links in the way HN and Reddit are now).
- iso8859-1 14y ago
  Maktoob didn't disappear: www.maktoob.com

nilkn 14y ago

That's not an extraordinary claim at all. It's called marketing. Companies spend millions on it all the time. And it's far from "completely unsubstantiated." Summly was objectively not very good, and the developer appears to have more family connections than he does raw engineering talent. Yahoo! has tons of talented engineers working for them who could have easily put together another shoddy summarization app (except Yahoo! isn't even using the app--they're shutting it down). Why would they dish out (reportedly) $30 million for a kid who hasn't even graduated from high school?

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- rdouble 14y ago
  that's not really how it works
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
argonaut 14y ago
Your logic: It's not option 1 or 2 (statement is unsubstantiated - when you say it "was objectively not very good," you really mean "in my opinion it was not very good"). So it must be option 3 (also unsubstantiated), since option 3 is the only option left (unsubstantiated). To answer your last question: 1) As far as I know that kid did not hold any high-ranking role at the company anymore; the talent probably lay elsewhere. 2) There are many reasons and unless your name begins with Marissa and ends with Mayer, you cannot know for sure.

metaphorm 14y ago

I think I agree with that claim actually. Yahoo's biggest deficit is not a lack of news summarizing apps, and is not a lack of engineering talent. Its deficit is a shitty reputation as a has-been company that is uninteresting to dynamic young talent. I very much think they bought themselves a boy wonder so they could show him off to the press. I doubt the company actually needs him or his product in any direct sense.