9 ms·

Why Yahoo Keeps Killing Everything It Buys

85 points by gozzoo 12y ago

dafnap 12y ago
Yahoo wants the developers not their ideas.
- hrktb 12y ago
  A company can be bought for anything really, if it makes sense. As shubb points out, if it's cheaper to buy a company than to deal with licensing or legal problems, then it might be bought. Same if the overhead of dealing with a company as an external entity is too high compared to buying it outright and forcing it to come in-house (if the product or service isn't of any need after some time, the employees can still be shuffled in the org afterward)
- shubb 12y ago
  Or sometimes their software licences apparently: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-marissa-mayer-bought-a-30m-startup-2013-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/why-marissa-mayer-bought-a-30...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Grue3 12y ago
Do they really? They even kept that stupid Summly app, rebranding it as Yahoo News Digest. Then there's Aviate, Tumblr... I don't know, what else did they buy?
- DanAndersen 12y ago
  They bought and killed Astrid, my favorite to-do list manager. Todoist has turned out to be a pretty good replacement, though.
- uptown 12y ago
  Here's a list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Yahoo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition...!
  - sp332 12y ago
    But how many of those have been shuttered?
- Theodores 12y ago
  Was Summly that awful? I should hate my words to be crushed into some newspeak by some algorithm but I am not a journalist. I also like to read words written by a real human being. Hence Summly is not for me. However, I can see it appealing to those that get their news from 'free newspapers' etc. Was Summly that bad? Or was it the problem of 'child prodigy get rich' that gave it a bad reputation?
- paulrov 12y ago
  Summly was a hilarious bait and switch, their CEO was laughing all the way to the bank that they spent so much of such a weak pile of tech and no users.
general_failure 12y ago
Only time will tell if these decisions make any sense at all. We don't have much public information to work with about yahoo.
- username42 12y ago
  Mayer seems to view Yahoo primarily as a place where you can find all sorts of stuff on one giant app. “Once the user’s in that app experience, the easiest thing to do is stay in that app experience,”. I think this is a very insightful analysis. I think there are people that like the "yahoo" way of presenting applications. It may look old fashion to others, but there is a market. If it was not the case, yahoo would already be dead. If yahoo changes its mind to do the same as others, they would lose their soul and die. We have similar experience with RIM that left professional phones with keyboard to become an Apple follower. RIM is (almost) dead.
  - GVIrish 12y ago
    I don't think that's a good analogy, RIM was failing because they stayed the course for too long. As soon as the iPhone came along Blackberry should've jumped on the touchscreen bandwagon. Instead they clung to their keyboard phones for too long and lost many of their regular customers to iOS and Android. They still had a sizable lead in enterprise but even there they didn't fix some of their fundamental usability issues in a timely fashion, so a lot of enterprise customers started shifting towards Android and iOS. Blackberry's problem is that it too them far too long to respond to a sea change in their market. Had their first true flagship touchscreen phone come in 2009 instead of 2013 they might still be a big player.
    - edanm 12y ago
      Not sure if I buy this history. Most BB users I know absolutely loved the keyboard, and thought it worked much better than a touchscreen. It was also considered by many business users to be the only phone useable for business use because you could actually type quickly on it. Those users also abandoned the phone, but I don't know if it was because of the touchscreen.
zitterbewegung 12y ago
Are they arguing over percentage? Whats the percentage of google killing things that it buys or any company for that matter?
- _navaneethan 12y ago
  They are looking upon success of Google, and failure of Yahoo.
ommunist 12y ago
This is what you can call real disruption. Yahoo disrupts innovation. And it pays.
tpinto 12y ago
It's just sad to see Yahoo! in such a bad shape. I was just talking to a friend about the great Yahoo! in the times of Hack Day! and Brickhouse. They bought some of the hottest startups back in the days (Flickr, Delicious, Upcoming...) only to neglect them, shut them or let them die. These were amongst the first companies that had put the user front and centre, leveraging the fabled user generated content. This was of huge value for any company and they let it slip through their fingers. Also, at Brickhouse they developed Fire Eagle, one of the first services to work with location, and a great take on it too. A central and independent place where you could post your location to and then you'd grant access to other services choosing the level of detail (e.g. you phone was constantly posting your most accurate location and then Twitter could have access to your current City, Facebook to the Country you're in and Dark Sky could access Lat/Lon). And, of course, they once owned Geocities. Then they shut some stuff down, closed Brickhouse and I think they stopped hosting Hack Days. I know correlation does not imply causation but I find it very difficult to dissociate these two situations. How can a technology company thrive if they kill their innovation internal cycle? Yahoo! seems to once have had one of the best innovation cultures in industry only to see it disappear like this. Everything that has been happening since then (like death by acquisitions) looks like part of the plan or the lack of thereof.
- quarterto 12y ago
  At least they sold the Upcoming name back to Andy Baio: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/waxpancake/the-return-of-upcomingorg https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/waxpancake/the-return-o...
  - tpinto 12y ago
    Yup. I rejoiced at that and backed Andy right away. It may not end up being what Upcoming was before but it felt right to back his initiative anyway even if just to condemn Yahoo!s take on it. Upcoming is just another example: way ahead of its time. Take the number of companies in the events space nowadays. Take the millions of dollars invested or spent in such companies. Lots of meetups happening everyday around the world... Yahoo! has just let it die instead. It's even hard to argue that Upcoming was off because it was ahead. I can't see why the events on Upcoming wouldn't turn into what meetups are today. All it needed was someone to take care of the product and the community. Gatherings and events have been happening since before Upcoming was created and are now being managed on Meetup, Eventbright, Lanyrd, etc... It isn't the case of these companies creating a new space for them, they just took it from where Upcoming (and others, probably) left.
paulrov 12y ago
> When Zuckerberg buys a company, from Instagram to WhatsApp, he lets it grow on its own. He capitalizes on the fact that those companies have their own following and uses that to grow Isn't it a bit early to make any judgements on this?
ellysetaylor21 12y ago
I think they are planning something big, finger crossed and hoping this time yahoo idea will work for the company :S
boyaka 12y ago
I really hate Yahoo. When they bought Geocities they changed my user name that had 64 in it to 63 automatically. What a stupid number. Then, because I didn't log into it within a certain time frame, they up and deleted all my content. It was the first (and only, really, besides school requirement...) personal website I ever built, in 6th grade. It had all the cool images, gifs, midis I had gathered on the internet and I even created custom gifs for it. I even copy pasted some javascript code to make my gifs animate when moused over. Even though I only used the email account they automatically set up for me for junk registrations (my main mail was already @home/attbi/comcast before they bought geocities, then gmail when that was created), I ended up making a second yahoo account with a name that wasn't lame (which I still used for junk registrations, and other random things, but moreso than the one automatically created). One day the password on that second email account suddenly changed. I used the same password on both the accounts for years with zero sign of infiltration. I still continue to use accounts tied to the one with the mysteriously changed password. I did everything I could to get that one back with no luck. Maybe I was compromised by some hacker? I do recall during my efforts being asked by yahoo support something along the lines of "is this your main account?". There was never anybody that I could talk to, only text support, and most of my attempts/ticket submissions went ignored. Maybe they think I'm a hacker. In the end, nothing but bitter feelings toward Yahoo for me.
- mu_killnine 12y ago
  +1 for middle school website-building nostalgia.
  - zx2c4 12y ago
    Did anyone else here get their start on expage and funkychickens?
  - will_work4tears 12y ago
    Ugh, I feel old. CERN apparently put up the first website when I was in middle school.
    - 12y ago
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
bedhead 12y ago
I cant recall a luckier, more overrated CEO in my career than Marissa Mayer. She shows up right before Alibaba (and wild valuations) takes off. Dan Loeb gets involved to turbocharge the stock, which has done well solely because of Alibaba. She makes a bunch of expensive, terrible acquisitions and insists she didn't overpay for these odd non-revenue generating assets in the midst of a minor tech bubble, while providing no evidence. Yahoo itself, meanwhile, continues to decline and is regarded by most as a structural mess. Management is overpaid beyond the point of reason, the former COO being exhibit A for all that's wrong with management comp and corporate governance. I hope this company goes down in flames.
- smoyer 12y ago
  I tend to agree with you but every once in a while I wonder whether she's so much smarter than me that I just can't comprehend her strategy.
  - moron4hire 12y ago
    In art, we worry about the viewer not understanding our work. It comes down to shared culture. A reader or viewer doesn't understand the work because the work does not communicate to them in a language they understand. Is it because the work is too forward thinking? Or is it just gibberish? It tends to work out that the artists who spent the most for their degrees will lean towards it being "too forward thinking" more often than the rest of us.
- ry0ohki 12y ago
  Alibaba took off long before Mayer arrived. Regardless of financial improvements, the products have seen more innovation than the previous 10 years. I now have 3 Yahoo apps on my phone! Some improvements have been for the better, some for the worse, but she seems to have at least broken the "do nothing" attitude at Yahoo previously.
  - ProAm 12y ago
    What apps? I didnt know Yahoo even made stand alone apps for mobile.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Tycho 12y ago
A separate yahoo finance app launched recently. I like it a lot. I think yahoo.com is a great 'portal' - there's still a place for that I think
JonFish85 12y ago
Isn't it fairly obvious that there are two categories of companies that they buy: the ones they count on for strategic business (Flickr), and the ones they acquire just for the people? I have to imagine that the latter is mostly just to infuse Yahoo with young, energetic people who are willing & able to work long hours if given a proper vision. Sure you can put out a lot of job reqs, but this seems like the way Mayer has chosen to try to infuse Yahoo with talent & energy.
- hibikir 12y ago
  They just forget one very important problem: You can try to buy people by buying the company they work for, but chances are they will not want to stick around after the company culture has been trampled over. Been there a few times over my career: Those acquisitions are, in almost all cases, a disaster.
- jaynos 12y ago
  Is that really a good strategy? I've seen this reason before (buy the company for the people), but is it really reasonable to spend over $1B on a company for such a small number of employees? I don't see Yahoo! needing to keep the non engineer/CS people.
Duhck 12y ago
While I too am inclined to hate Yahoo, perhaps out of envy that a shitty, failed idea I might have come up with wasn't acquihired for tens of millions of dollars, their stock tells a different story. Not that a successful business is defined by its stock price, but she is performing in a way that the board and its investors are likely quite happy. The price has nearly doubled since she took over. https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1400159934404&chddm=488359&chls=IntervalBasedLine&q=NASDAQ:YHOO&ntsp=0&ei=dL50U7CrFuOksQevxIDQDg https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&... That is surely worth something?
- speeder 12y ago
  Not really. When you calculate the stock price minus alibaba valuation increase, Yahoo is still declining (in fact Alibaba has MORE value than Yahoo itself, resulting in Yahoo having "negative" value)
ajays 12y ago
The answer, near the end: "Yahoo ... has little to lose by shutting down an also-ran competitor like Blink" There you go.
Aqueous 12y ago
I guess I really don't understand her mobile strategy. Yahoo is a constellation of tons of different services and they all belong in different apps. Are they going to have one big "Yahoo Mega-App?" That makes even less sense than Facebook's central app, because at least you can look at Facebook as offering a cohesive, singular service. But even Facebook is unbundling because it realizes that it can offer a better experience if each app just focuses on a single component of their platform. What is she thinking?
shawndumas 12y ago
"In theory you could beat the death spiral by buying good programmers instead of hiring them. You can get programmers who would never have come to you as employees by buying their startups. But so far the only companies smart enough to do this are companies smart enough not to need to." --http://paulgraham.com/yahoo.html#f2n http://paulgraham.com/yahoo.html#f2n
vampirechicken 12y ago
So Yahoo wants to the the modern equivalent of AOL. At least they can articulate a strategy.
henrikschroder 12y ago
Not everything.

85 points by gozzoo 12y ago

dafnap 12y ago

Yahoo wants the developers not their ideas.

hrktb 12y ago
A company can be bought for anything really, if it makes sense. As shubb points out, if it's cheaper to buy a company than to deal with licensing or legal problems, then it might be bought. Same if the overhead of dealing with a company as an external entity is too high compared to buying it outright and forcing it to come in-house (if the product or service isn't of any need after some time, the employees can still be shuffled in the org afterward)
shubb 12y ago
Or sometimes their software licences apparently: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-marissa-mayer-bought-a-30m-startup-2013-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/why-marissa-mayer-bought-a-30...

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

Grue3 12y ago

Do they really? They even kept that stupid Summly app, rebranding it as Yahoo News Digest. Then there's Aviate, Tumblr... I don't know, what else did they buy?

DanAndersen 12y ago
They bought and killed Astrid, my favorite to-do list manager. Todoist has turned out to be a pretty good replacement, though.
uptown 12y ago
Here's a list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Yahoo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition...!
- sp332 12y ago
  But how many of those have been shuttered?
Theodores 12y ago
Was Summly that awful? I should hate my words to be crushed into some newspeak by some algorithm but I am not a journalist. I also like to read words written by a real human being. Hence Summly is not for me. However, I can see it appealing to those that get their news from 'free newspapers' etc. Was Summly that bad? Or was it the problem of 'child prodigy get rich' that gave it a bad reputation?
paulrov 12y ago
Summly was a hilarious bait and switch, their CEO was laughing all the way to the bank that they spent so much of such a weak pile of tech and no users.

general_failure 12y ago

Only time will tell if these decisions make any sense at all. We don't have much public information to work with about yahoo.

username42 12y ago
Mayer seems to view Yahoo primarily as a place where you can find all sorts of stuff on one giant app. “Once the user’s in that app experience, the easiest thing to do is stay in that app experience,”. I think this is a very insightful analysis. I think there are people that like the "yahoo" way of presenting applications. It may look old fashion to others, but there is a market. If it was not the case, yahoo would already be dead. If yahoo changes its mind to do the same as others, they would lose their soul and die. We have similar experience with RIM that left professional phones with keyboard to become an Apple follower. RIM is (almost) dead.
- GVIrish 12y ago
  I don't think that's a good analogy, RIM was failing because they stayed the course for too long. As soon as the iPhone came along Blackberry should've jumped on the touchscreen bandwagon. Instead they clung to their keyboard phones for too long and lost many of their regular customers to iOS and Android. They still had a sizable lead in enterprise but even there they didn't fix some of their fundamental usability issues in a timely fashion, so a lot of enterprise customers started shifting towards Android and iOS. Blackberry's problem is that it too them far too long to respond to a sea change in their market. Had their first true flagship touchscreen phone come in 2009 instead of 2013 they might still be a big player.
  - edanm 12y ago
    Not sure if I buy this history. Most BB users I know absolutely loved the keyboard, and thought it worked much better than a touchscreen. It was also considered by many business users to be the only phone useable for business use because you could actually type quickly on it. Those users also abandoned the phone, but I don't know if it was because of the touchscreen.

zitterbewegung 12y ago

Are they arguing over percentage? Whats the percentage of google killing things that it buys or any company for that matter?

_navaneethan 12y ago
They are looking upon success of Google, and failure of Yahoo.

ommunist 12y ago

This is what you can call real disruption. Yahoo disrupts innovation. And it pays.

tpinto 12y ago

It's just sad to see Yahoo! in such a bad shape. I was just talking to a friend about the great Yahoo! in the times of Hack Day! and Brickhouse. They bought some of the hottest startups back in the days (Flickr, Delicious, Upcoming...) only to neglect them, shut them or let them die. These were amongst the first companies that had put the user front and centre, leveraging the fabled user generated content. This was of huge value for any company and they let it slip through their fingers. Also, at Brickhouse they developed Fire Eagle, one of the first services to work with location, and a great take on it too. A central and independent place where you could post your location to and then you'd grant access to other services choosing the level of detail (e.g. you phone was constantly posting your most accurate location and then Twitter could have access to your current City, Facebook to the Country you're in and Dark Sky could access Lat/Lon). And, of course, they once owned Geocities. Then they shut some stuff down, closed Brickhouse and I think they stopped hosting Hack Days. I know correlation does not imply causation but I find it very difficult to dissociate these two situations. How can a technology company thrive if they kill their innovation internal cycle? Yahoo! seems to once have had one of the best innovation cultures in industry only to see it disappear like this. Everything that has been happening since then (like death by acquisitions) looks like part of the plan or the lack of thereof.

quarterto 12y ago
At least they sold the Upcoming name back to Andy Baio: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/waxpancake/the-return-of-upcomingorg https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/waxpancake/the-return-o...
- tpinto 12y ago
  Yup. I rejoiced at that and backed Andy right away. It may not end up being what Upcoming was before but it felt right to back his initiative anyway even if just to condemn Yahoo!s take on it. Upcoming is just another example: way ahead of its time. Take the number of companies in the events space nowadays. Take the millions of dollars invested or spent in such companies. Lots of meetups happening everyday around the world... Yahoo! has just let it die instead. It's even hard to argue that Upcoming was off because it was ahead. I can't see why the events on Upcoming wouldn't turn into what meetups are today. All it needed was someone to take care of the product and the community. Gatherings and events have been happening since before Upcoming was created and are now being managed on Meetup, Eventbright, Lanyrd, etc... It isn't the case of these companies creating a new space for them, they just took it from where Upcoming (and others, probably) left.

paulrov 12y ago

> When Zuckerberg buys a company, from Instagram to WhatsApp, he lets it grow on its own. He capitalizes on the fact that those companies have their own following and uses that to grow Isn't it a bit early to make any judgements on this?

ellysetaylor21 12y ago

I think they are planning something big, finger crossed and hoping this time yahoo idea will work for the company :S

boyaka 12y ago

I really hate Yahoo. When they bought Geocities they changed my user name that had 64 in it to 63 automatically. What a stupid number. Then, because I didn't log into it within a certain time frame, they up and deleted all my content. It was the first (and only, really, besides school requirement...) personal website I ever built, in 6th grade. It had all the cool images, gifs, midis I had gathered on the internet and I even created custom gifs for it. I even copy pasted some javascript code to make my gifs animate when moused over. Even though I only used the email account they automatically set up for me for junk registrations (my main mail was already @home/attbi/comcast before they bought geocities, then gmail when that was created), I ended up making a second yahoo account with a name that wasn't lame (which I still used for junk registrations, and other random things, but moreso than the one automatically created). One day the password on that second email account suddenly changed. I used the same password on both the accounts for years with zero sign of infiltration. I still continue to use accounts tied to the one with the mysteriously changed password. I did everything I could to get that one back with no luck. Maybe I was compromised by some hacker? I do recall during my efforts being asked by yahoo support something along the lines of "is this your main account?". There was never anybody that I could talk to, only text support, and most of my attempts/ticket submissions went ignored. Maybe they think I'm a hacker. In the end, nothing but bitter feelings toward Yahoo for me.

mu_killnine 12y ago
+1 for middle school website-building nostalgia.
- zx2c4 12y ago
  Did anyone else here get their start on expage and funkychickens?
- will_work4tears 12y ago
  Ugh, I feel old. CERN apparently put up the first website when I was in middle school.
  - 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

bedhead 12y ago

I cant recall a luckier, more overrated CEO in my career than Marissa Mayer. She shows up right before Alibaba (and wild valuations) takes off. Dan Loeb gets involved to turbocharge the stock, which has done well solely because of Alibaba. She makes a bunch of expensive, terrible acquisitions and insists she didn't overpay for these odd non-revenue generating assets in the midst of a minor tech bubble, while providing no evidence. Yahoo itself, meanwhile, continues to decline and is regarded by most as a structural mess. Management is overpaid beyond the point of reason, the former COO being exhibit A for all that's wrong with management comp and corporate governance. I hope this company goes down in flames.

smoyer 12y ago
I tend to agree with you but every once in a while I wonder whether she's so much smarter than me that I just can't comprehend her strategy.
- moron4hire 12y ago
  In art, we worry about the viewer not understanding our work. It comes down to shared culture. A reader or viewer doesn't understand the work because the work does not communicate to them in a language they understand. Is it because the work is too forward thinking? Or is it just gibberish? It tends to work out that the artists who spent the most for their degrees will lean towards it being "too forward thinking" more often than the rest of us.
ry0ohki 12y ago
Alibaba took off long before Mayer arrived. Regardless of financial improvements, the products have seen more innovation than the previous 10 years. I now have 3 Yahoo apps on my phone! Some improvements have been for the better, some for the worse, but she seems to have at least broken the "do nothing" attitude at Yahoo previously.
- ProAm 12y ago
  What apps? I didnt know Yahoo even made stand alone apps for mobile.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

Tycho 12y ago

A separate yahoo finance app launched recently. I like it a lot. I think yahoo.com is a great 'portal' - there's still a place for that I think

JonFish85 12y ago

Isn't it fairly obvious that there are two categories of companies that they buy: the ones they count on for strategic business (Flickr), and the ones they acquire just for the people? I have to imagine that the latter is mostly just to infuse Yahoo with young, energetic people who are willing & able to work long hours if given a proper vision. Sure you can put out a lot of job reqs, but this seems like the way Mayer has chosen to try to infuse Yahoo with talent & energy.

hibikir 12y ago
They just forget one very important problem: You can try to buy people by buying the company they work for, but chances are they will not want to stick around after the company culture has been trampled over. Been there a few times over my career: Those acquisitions are, in almost all cases, a disaster.
jaynos 12y ago
Is that really a good strategy? I've seen this reason before (buy the company for the people), but is it really reasonable to spend over $1B on a company for such a small number of employees? I don't see Yahoo! needing to keep the non engineer/CS people.

Duhck 12y ago

While I too am inclined to hate Yahoo, perhaps out of envy that a shitty, failed idea I might have come up with wasn't acquihired for tens of millions of dollars, their stock tells a different story. Not that a successful business is defined by its stock price, but she is performing in a way that the board and its investors are likely quite happy. The price has nearly doubled since she took over. https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1400159934404&chddm=488359&chls=IntervalBasedLine&q=NASDAQ:YHOO&ntsp=0&ei=dL50U7CrFuOksQevxIDQDg https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&... That is surely worth something?

speeder 12y ago
Not really. When you calculate the stock price minus alibaba valuation increase, Yahoo is still declining (in fact Alibaba has MORE value than Yahoo itself, resulting in Yahoo having "negative" value)

ajays 12y ago

The answer, near the end: "Yahoo ... has little to lose by shutting down an also-ran competitor like Blink" There you go.

Aqueous 12y ago

I guess I really don't understand her mobile strategy. Yahoo is a constellation of tons of different services and they all belong in different apps. Are they going to have one big "Yahoo Mega-App?" That makes even less sense than Facebook's central app, because at least you can look at Facebook as offering a cohesive, singular service. But even Facebook is unbundling because it realizes that it can offer a better experience if each app just focuses on a single component of their platform. What is she thinking?

shawndumas 12y ago

"In theory you could beat the death spiral by buying good programmers instead of hiring them. You can get programmers who would never have come to you as employees by buying their startups. But so far the only companies smart enough to do this are companies smart enough not to need to." --http://paulgraham.com/yahoo.html#f2n http://paulgraham.com/yahoo.html#f2n

vampirechicken 12y ago

So Yahoo wants to the the modern equivalent of AOL. At least they can articulate a strategy.

henrikschroder 12y ago

Not everything.