9 ms·
Yahoo committed seppuku today
- pclark 17y agosurprisingly good [albeit ridiculously hard to read. grey on white? ugh] post. I liked the aggression + innovation = fighting.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- Herring 17y agohttp://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
- messel 17y agoNice Herring, thanks much.
- sangaya 17y agoWhat a great site! Thanks for sharing; I'll be using this on many other sites to improve readability.
- mattculbreth 17y agoWow now I can read Daring Fireball, thanks!
- bkovitz 17y agoThis is great! I've been wanting this for years!
- raamdev 17y agoAwesome.
- jonursenbach 17y agoIf you don't want to deal with the horrible color scheme, subscribe to his mailing list. It's all the same content.
- pbhjpbhj 17y agoThat's good I might use that on my blog - don't like this horrible, barely readable colour scheme; subscribe to my mailing list or feed and get the content in a readable format!
- wglb 17y agoSort of a self-downmod font, don't you think? What you said, but I think pompous and self-serving. And possibly wrong.
- TallGuyShort 17y agoI'm really surprised about Yahoo's market share. I've generally found it a lower quality search than both Bing and Google, and other than this deal I haven't heard anyone talk about it at all. I know a lot of people that have their home page set to MSN by default, but I haven't heard of Yahoo being someone's homepage in years. What's everyone else's experience with this? Does anyone here use Yahoo, and if so, why?
- michael_dorfman 17y agoI don't use Yahoo search, but my start-page is MyYahoo, and has been for eons. Because of this, a fair bit of the news I read is via Yahoo's aggregators.
- whowhatwher3 17y agolazy red-state trailing-edge forty-something users will use the search box placed in front of them
- zmimon 17y agoAnyone who uses Yahoo mail gets Yahoo news, sport, weather etc. shoved in their face every time they check their mail. From there people are linked into a network of stuff including search. And Yahoo mail by the way is massive - I can't remember the actual status but they are a multiple of any of their competitors in size and google is a tiny small fraction. I think people underestimate the importance of this just because email isn't seen as sexy these days - but it's eyeballs, and very sticky ones (sorry for image :-) ), they come back regularly again and again - people with lots of history in their Yahoo mail are pretty much never going to leave.
- bkovitz 17y ago"Innovation is all you have"? Microsoft has never innovated, not even at the beginning. Many big players in many industries have never been innovators. These guys have something else: a strong bargaining position. "Innovation is a fleeting advantage." Cornering a market, setting up barriers to entry—those are time-tested and effective ways to make serious money.
- hyperbovine 17y agoThank you. I can't count the # of times I've heard Microsoft described as innovative. Yet, nearly every time they try to innovate they fail. MS Bob anyone? Or how about that home automation pitch they made in the late 90s? Or Cablesoft / MS Media Server. Nearly every single one of their successes came from copying the competition (XBox, Windows) or through acquisition (Frontpage, Hotmail). And a lot of their failures (Zune, Vista, Win7 TBD) came from un-successfully copying the competition. Office is home grown, makes a lot of money and seems to innovate on its own, but it seems like the exception to the rule.
- bkovitz 17y agoIt's part of the mythology of American capitalism: if they're a big winner, they must be a big innovator, because innovation drives the economy! Don't get me wrong, I love American capitalism, and I don't think innovation trumps all other factors (like reliability). The myth of Microsoft innovation is just one of those peculiar cultural myths that, in this case, blocks out the reality for people who don't work in the field.
- pbhjpbhj 17y agoReliability trumps innovation if people want to use the same stuff for a long time. In the consumer market it seems it's all about new stuff. People chuck out perfectly serviceable items because there's a new model they want. Which companies would bother to make a reliable mobile phone or computer for the mass market. The facade of innovation works for larger items too. Why create a vehicle that lasts long after the 5 year bodywork warranty when you're just reducing your market. Entice people with the new model, make sure your goods don't last too long - that appears to be the capitalist way.
- bkovitz 17y agoThis deal is the most demoralizing news I've heard in a long time. It calls for some kind of ritual lamentation. Any ideas?
- whowhatwher3 17y agoyou could search for "ritual lamentation" on yahoo search...that would be some kind of self-referrential tribute
- noonespecial 17y ago"Bing, bang, bung". Said in a sad, whimsical voice as one shakes one's head and turns away.
- scott_s 17y agoHonest question: why do you find it demoralizing?
- messel 17y agoI'm guessing that he dug Yahoo in the old days much like myself. Kinda weird seeing them working a deal with MSFT. I guess Google needs some competition in search.
- scott_s 17y agoI guess I see as positive since I've thought for years that Yahoo could not continue on the path they're on. This seems like a necessary change for the better.
- zmimon 17y agoSo are you depressed by Facebook doing a deal with MS? MS is enormous. This deal is just collaborating on search - I don't understand why people are taking it like it's the end of Yahoo as an independent entity.
- bkovitz 17y agoBecause the Microsoft Way is to give top priority to holding on to the high-leverage point in a market, and to do the lowest-quality engineering they can get away with to hold onto it. Their internal culture favors mediocre work as long as it's done fast and the testers don't find too many bugs. Search is now one of the highest-leverage points in the world economy, and it will become more important as time goes on. Microsoft having their claws a little deeper into search means they will use that position not so much to give people everywhere access to information, but mostly to help other Microsoft ventures grab and hold market share against competitors.
- whowhatwher3 17y agoat some point search was going to become a two-horse race, and its clear that yahoo was looking to get out of the massive capital expenditures and headcount behind the search engine and search advertising system (panama). once you decide to exit, you're no longer investing. the longer you avoid investing, the less value the bargain holds. bartz got a better deal now than she would be able to get in 2012. the whole "innovation" thing is a canard...the risks in making serious changes in search far outweigh the rewards...marketshare gains are going to happen now with deals like this, not better algorithms my next bet is apple replaces google with bing in iphone apps etc as the google/apple thing heats up microsoft could be a big beneficiary of people looking to avoid the google borg
- bjplink 17y agoThe very first thing I thought of when this deal was announced was how similar it felt to how Google first got traction by lending their technology to a Yahoo "front-end." This feels like throwing the baby out with the bath water all over again. I don't normally agree with Calacanis (although it's hard to argue with his success) but he's dead on about this I'm afraid.
- jasonmcalacanis 17y agoNote: It's actually OK to agree with me 38% of the time (i.e. the actual percentage of time I'm correct).
- bjplink 17y agoFor what it's worth, 100% of my fear wasn't about you being right but about Yahoo being officially dead.
- hymanroth 17y agoIs you real or is you fake?
- jimboyoungblood 17y agoc'mon, what are the chances someone is gonna create a fake calcanis account on HN?
- hymanroth 17y agoDunno. That's why I asked. Pretty high?
- jasonmcalacanis 17y agowell, I'm using my Facebook account, so chance are this is really me. :-)
- sachinag 17y agoI think he's incredibly wrong, and I'm surprised by it because he founded Weblogs, Inc. and should know better. Yahoo is now a media creation and curation company. Yahoo Sports is number one, Yahoo News is top five (HHS Secretary Sebelius had an exclusive op-ed in YN yesterday), OMG is killing TMZ and others, and so on and so forth. Yahoo's strategy of original content and great curation is all about stickiness. Let's be clear - Yahoo will still sell the very best ads for themselves, and Microsoft gets that sales expertise as well. No one on the face of this earth sells premium online ad space better than Yahoo. Yahoo has clearly decided that they won't play in search any more, and that's a rational decision - they only played in search for a small period of their history. They were powered by Inktomi before Google, and now will be by Bing for the next ten years, and presumably something other than Bing after that.
- jamesk2 17y agoBing on Yahoo search results pages is a product endorsement. Users will become familiar and comfortable using a Bing branded product. Bing Sports is a text ad on the current "sports" search results page. It'll go from, WTF is Bing to, "oh Bing, they have sports news" It is like BMW switching to Toyota engines and putting a little sticker on the dashboard that says Powered by Lexus. How long will BMW last when that happens?
- gtzi 17y ago"It is like BMW switching to Toyota engines and putting a little sticker on the dashboard that says Powered by Lexus. How long will BMW last when that happens?" Could not have said it better.
- froo 17y ago"It is like BMW switching to Toyota engines and putting a little sticker on the dashboard that says Powered by Lexus. How long will BMW last when that happens?" Unfortunately, that analogy just doesn't work in the car industry. People will still buy the BMW because it is a BMW. To back it up, I'll give you a two real world examples, both to do with another car Manufacturer - Porsche. When Dr Ferdinand Porsche first created his company, his Porsche 64 was created using many parts from the VW Beetle. From my personal experience, back in 2002, I was helping my brother strip down his 1986 Porsche 944 turbo to be raced in 03. While pulling the car down, I noticed that many of the parts were manufactured by Audi and VW (which admittedly owns Audi). Even while we were stripping the sound proofing material off the body, I found out that the body of the car was manufactured by Audi, which to me was very surprising (given the body was one of the main selling points of the car at the time, even Mazda ripped off the design for the RX7). If I had to give a rough breakdown in parts, I would have said that particular model was a 3-way split when it came to who's parts were in the car. As for Porsche's company performance, they are one of the strongest car brands worldwide and definitely one of the most profitable, in 07 having made 5.8 Billion Euro profit off of 7.3 Billion Euro in revenue. Currently, the only thing that is causing them headaches is their financial acrobatics, not the fact that their cars are made out of other manufacturer's parts. So unfortunately, your analogy just doesn't hold up.
- c00p3r 17y agoSo, there are just Google and Microsoft, and that is very good for Google, because a good karma matters! And where is Apple with "the search for rest of us"? =)
- TweedHeads 17y agoJerry Yang would have never sold out. Now this newcomer gets greedy, some money exchanging hands under the table and now Yahoo search is dead. Carol Bartz? she will be forgotten quickly.
- vijayr 17y agosuicide? how? which is better? giving up the areas in which yahoo can't win, getting a good deal in return and concentrating on the areas they are strong in or trying to fight a losing battle, sinking millions of dollars in the process? His logic seems to be 'search is very important so yahoo shouldn't give up its second place'. It doesn't matter search is uber important, what matters is whether yahoo can keep its place. They certainly feel they can't, so its very sensible to get out before the going gets really bad. good business is all about deciding which areas to play, and knowing when to leave
- papa 17y agoI agree with you, but imho Yahoo should have made these decisions years ago. Yahoo has clearly made a lot of bets it hasn't been able to follow through on (acquisition bets alone tell a sorry tale: Broadcast, Geocities, Inktomi, Overture). When I was at Yahoo during the "dot bomb" crash. Yahoo was scrambling to decrease its reliance on advertising and made a big push into premium/paid subscriptions. Well that fizzled. As did Terry Semel's entertainment strategy and the subsequent attempt to go toe-to-toe with GOOG. Personally, I like the entertainment/media portal strategy (out of the remaining options available). But at this point it still feels like Yahoo is being pushed into this strategy rather than boldy pushing forward with it. I think that's partially why it feals more like defeat/retreat at this point than anything else. Present-day Yahoo just can't shake that feeling of failure/lost opportunity in the eyes of many observers. That's gonna hound them for a long time until they can garner up a bona fide hit.
- Ardit20 17y ago"Chapter three will be the two-horse race of Microsoft and Google" Starts singing - - - I'm so excited..... Dude, Yahoo search was dying anyway, which is a shame because people like Yahoo, it's just that they have not been advertising so much. Like google had the benefit of viral marketing, to counteract it, Yahoo should have aggressively marketed itself to put its name out there. I mean, people in Europe probably hardly know of Yahoo compared to Google, which I do not think is true in the US. So, in an ideal world I would have liked the Yahoo search brand to be kept, but the brains behind it to be of microsoft. This way, if played right, there could be a serious competitor and who knows we may get a 60 - 40 market share, and in that dream world, the publisher, or the user would hold the power. As a side note, interesting that although Yahoo stock has gone down around 11%, Microsoft's stock has barely moved, I would have expected it to shoot up.
- rythie 17y agoIs tweaking some complicated algorithm, really innovation anyway? I think Yahoo are better off leaving this problem to Microsoft. People don't tend to call Microsoft innovative and search is an established place that they want to be in - this is normal behavior for them. Microsoft are in a good position for doing search by acquiring powerset and other companies (as Jason mentions). Microsoft this more so they can compete with Google directly and Yahoo have better sense. Yahoo is doing stuff that neither Google or Microsoft do well, like Flickr, Del.icio.us, News and other content. Innovation from the customers point of view would come from improving the interface to search, which Yahoo can do without doing the algorithm themselves. If look at what they offer with the BOSS and search monkey APIs http://developer.yahoo.com/search/ http://developer.yahoo.com/search/ Yahoo is keen on this direction. At the Yahoo Hackday London in May they were pushing these APIs with talks and handing out documentation etc.
- thomasfl 17y agoIn ye olden days, before google, yahoo was the search that returned the best results ordered by relevance. They had to create their index manually to do so, but it kind of worked for a while.
- ErrantX 17y ago> Microsoft does not enter a market unless it’s important, huge and on the way to becoming even bigger. Wait? So they've only just entered the search market? hmmm. Ramblings methinks.
- jalammar 17y agoWith Twitter’s repositioning as “real-time search”, and search becoming a two-dog race, both Google and MS must be salivating to buy Twitter. I wouldn’t be surprised if either of them laid down 1+ Billion to get ahead under these circumstances.
- Slzr 17y agoWhy Yahoo never copied the adwords model is the biggest failure in the history of business.