4 ms·
They do still have some smart people, but I don't think anyone or any amount of money can turn things around for them in any meaningful way. Their pre-Marissa
by skuhn 12y ago
They do still have some smart people, but I don't think anyone or any amount of money can turn things around for them in any meaningful way.
Their pre-Marissa acquisitions were almost universally wastes of time and money. It's too soon to tell about the recent acquisitions, but I don't see them making that $1bn back from Tumblr in my lifetime.
Yahoo is an also ran, constantly playing catch up and trying to emulate the successful behaviors of other companies. The negative public perception of a lot of their services in the technical community is mirrored inside the company, and there is nothing anyone can do to force positive change. Things that Google and Facebook and others announce were projects 3-4 years ago inside Yahoo, that never launched. Once you see that happen a few times, you get sufficiently disillusioned and leave. I don't think for all of Marissa's impact that this has fundamentally changed.
For example: Yahoo employees have to use Yahoo Mail for all of their work e-mail. The web interface only, with ads. It's a great exercise in dogfooding, IF you commit to rapidly iterating on the product to make it best of breed for your employees (not to mention real users). But that will never happen at Yahoo, there is no will to make an excellent product for a technically demanding audience.
Now your employee productivity suffers, which means every other product in the company suffers. Eventually you will have to let them go back to using e-mail the way they want to or they will find a way to screen scrape the messages into fetchmail in order to get back to work.
- _pmf_ 12y ago> But that will never happen at Yahoo, there is no will to make an excellent product for a technically demanding audience. That seriously leads me to ask me what the fuck the engineers are actually doing there if they're not improving a core product.
- skuhn 12y agoIn my experience, there is an astonishing amount of work to do just keeping your head above water. Particularly in a corporate environment where you spend 90% of your time getting permission and buy-in for the other 10% where real work occurs. It's demoralizing to say the least.
- toyg 12y ago>Yahoo employees have to use Yahoo Mail for all of their work e-mail. The web interface only, with ads. That is... terrifying. No wonder smart people leave.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- pauleastlund 12y ago> Yahoo employees have to use Yahoo Mail for all of their work e-mail. The web interface only, with ads. I don't know where you got this from, if it was true but no longer isn't, or if it's only true in parts of the company, but I was just there for 13 months after an acqui-hire and no one ever made me or anyone on my team use Yahoo Mail.
- skuhn 12y agoThe mandate to use Yahoo Mail for corp users is from the last month or two. Perhaps it does not cover the entire company, but my understanding was that it did. Yahoo corp mail was previously Exchange (!). Also awful, but at least it supports IMAP.
- pauleastlund 12y agoOK, nevermind -- your information is newer than mine. I escaped Yahoo late last year, so I wouldn't've heard about this.