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I worked on Pipes briefly, shortly after it launched. It was really two distinct products rolled into one. The visual interface was groundbreaking and stunning-
by idlewords 11y ago
I worked on Pipes briefly, shortly after it launched. It was really two distinct products rolled into one. The visual interface was groundbreaking and stunning-I think half my team was hired on the strength of that demo. No one could believe Javascript could do that.
The backend was an extremely useful tool for munging RSS feeds. With any kind of support, or even benign neglect, the product would have been successful. It took a lot of active mismanagement and folly to keep Pipes from living up to its promise.
Hats off to psadri and the other Pipes creators for a really stellar piece of work.
- psadri 11y agoThanks :) Pipes's interface is primary the work of Jonathan Trevor, with lots of help from Daniel Raffel, Ed Ho and others.
- smacktoward 11y ago> It took a lot of active mismanagement and folly to keep Pipes from living up to its promise. I feel like this unique blend will be Yahoo's lasting contribution to the field of management theory.
- bsder 11y agoDEC/Compaq/HP is really hard to top in the area of mismanagement.
- sirkneeland 11y agoDon't forget Nokia. Going from #1 in a market to doing so badly that you exit the market--and all in the span of 3 years--is something to behold.
- hippiefahrzeug 11y agogood one. it's what one famous blogger calls the 'elop effect': http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/08/coining-term-elop-effect-when-you-combine-osborne-effect-and-ratner-effect.html http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/08/coining...
- sirkneeland 11y agoAhh, what a terrible CEO. When the only two possibilities to explain your tenure are 1) a lying co-conspirator or 2) mind-blowingly incompetent--then you've truly done a bang-up job.
- speeder 11y agoBy the way: many people in the past, including here on HN says that Elop was right, and that the reason Nokia died was 100% apple+google fault. Here in Brazil Elop effect was interesting: it was VERY obvious, yet noone here knows who the hell Elop is. To put it simple: When Elop released that stupid memo, Nokia had 67% of Brazil smartphone market share, and the share was still rising, and Nokia utterly dominated in the non-smartphone market too. Right after Elop memo, the first thing that happened is that suddenly the communities died (although Nokia store DID suck, there was at least in Brazil a vibrant freeware app community that shared stuff in forums), then just some months later you could not find phones for sale, even new models, because the import companies DID heard of Elop memo, and decided to not risk importing the phones, even if shopkeepers still wanted it. The end result was funny: Elop nuking of Symbian was so hard, that in Brazil other smartphones could not keep up for a while, and we temporarily had a decrease in smartphone use, and a increase in feature phone use, and that increase came mostly from truly crap chinese companies, because not even Nokia feature phones could be found in stores anymore.
- adventured 11y agoIt wasn't Elop that sank Nokia, it was Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo. By the time Elop was announced as CEO in late 2010, Kallasvuo had already guaranteed Nokia was toast. Just go back to the way Nokia was behaving, and what they were saying in 2007/2008 for easy proof of that. "Nokia CEO calls Apple iPhone ‘niche product’" http://macdailynews.com/2008/04/17/nokia_shares_slammed_in_wake_of_miss_ceo_calls_apple_iphone_niche_product/ http://macdailynews.com/2008/04/17/nokia_shares_slammed_in_w... http://www.informationweek.com/mobile/nokia-ceo-disses-iphone-doesnt-seem-worried-that-us-market-share-slipped-again/d/d-id/1066946 http://www.informationweek.com/mobile/nokia-ceo-disses-iphon...? http://www.forbes.com/2007/02/12/nokia-kallasvuo-iphone-faces-cx_cn_0212autofacescan01.html http://www.forbes.com/2007/02/12/nokia-kallasvuo-iphone-face... http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2007/1112/048.html http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2007/1112/048.html
- gcb0 11y agoi think nokia is more about lack of executive vision/market knowledge. The other examples are more about middle management, besides the executive lack of vision and bean counting.
- bane 11y agoI feel like Atari might be the grandfather of all this.
- evilotto 11y agoAnd Commodore would have to get an honorable mention
- tn13 11y agoIs Nokia's example really good ? Nokia remain one of the largest companies in telecom hardware provider and handsets was always a side business for them. They successfully sold it to microsoft.
- girvo 11y agoI'm still upset by the fact that MeeGo/Maemo was killed, and Nokia sold to Microsoft. The N9 was still the best phone I've ever used, and it's UX ideas are still the simplest and most effective way of using a phone, and yet no one else has implemented it.
- Zirro 11y agoJolla (https://jolla.com https://jolla.com) was founded by people involved in MeeGo development. While their phone got a lukewarm response, I've heard many good things about their upcoming tablet and have ordered one. As you used MeeGo, how does Sailfish OS appear to compare with it?
- girvo 11y agoSailfish unfortunately does not have all of the UI things I'm talking about -- the "three screen with edge gestures", which is a shame :( They couldn't, because the N9's UI was never open sourced despite the core being so.
- sirkneeland 11y agoAgreed
- georgemonck 11y agoIt took a lot of active mismanagement and folly to keep Pipes from living up to its promise. I would love to read a blog post about how exactly it was mismanaged. It would be great for others to learn lessons from the mistakes.
- smacktoward 11y agoThe first rule of Mismanagement Club is you never talk about how you got into Mismanagement Club.
- meatysnapper 11y agoGet a job at Twitter and you can see this in action. It's pretty epic.
- wutbrodo 11y agoI think most/many people could reasonably say this about their company; I currently work at Google and feel quite the same. I'm not convinced that either Google or Twitter[1] qualify as a particularly spectacular example of mismanagement though. [1] I don't have first-hand experience but one of my best friends work there and we regularly vent to each other about work complaints.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jakejake 11y agoI wrote a simple Wordpress plugin that works with RSS feeds. In addition to aggregating fees, Pipes has been a go-to solution when people report feeds that are malformed, have some weird characters or anything that chokes the Wordpress RSS parser (simplepie). People would run them through pipes, which seemed to handle anything and output clean RSS. I'm sad to see it go and it'll be missed by quite a few people who use my plugin.
- yenda 11y agomaybe www.busit.com can replace it for that matter
- edho 11y agoIt was really great to work with you. During the post-launch chaos, it was life saver that you didn't have your hair on fire like the rest of us :) Jonathan Trevor's Javascript was out of this world amazing for the time.
- aleem 11y agoI'll echo those sentiments, the UI for that time certainly had a wow factor. > With any kind of support, or even benign neglect, the product would have been successful. Look at IFTTT services now and it's easy to realize that pipes even in its original incarnation could have been so much more given its brain dead UI ease. It's a shame that Yahoo is shutting this down rather than pivoting it as an IFTTT or similar. I'd wager that it's lack of ownership that makes it hard to pivot. I also don't recall it having a premium tier which has got to weigh down the resources--talent always gravitates toward revenue centers it seems.
- jldugger 11y ago> talent always gravitates toward revenue centers it seems. Ie the 'new management can't fire my entire division for being unprofitable' center. Seems like a smart move for the people who wrote Pipes but never found a business model for it.