[HN Gopher] What went wrong for Yahoo
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What went wrong for Yahoo
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 85 points
Date : 2025-07-26 18:25 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dfarq.homeip.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (dfarq.homeip.net)
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| "In 1998, Yahoo turned down the opportunity to acquire Google for
| $1 million."
| jeffbee wrote:
| Sure, but Google is not inflating due to a cosmological
| constant. If Yahoo had acquired Google, Google would now be
| worthless, not a trillion-dollar company.
| rNULLED wrote:
| what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable
| object?
| dvh wrote:
| From falsehood, anything follows. (I'm implying here that
| you don't have unstoppable force and you don't have
| immovable object)
| kstrauser wrote:
| MSN.
| gscott wrote:
| I like how MSN manages to pack so much content onto a
| single page--it's surprisingly intuitive. I'm not sure
| why that kind of formatting isn't more common.
| bborud wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| Don't forget that Yahoo bought three search engines.
|
| (Full disclosure: I worked for one of the companies they
| acquired).
| baal80spam wrote:
| > Google is not inflating due to a cosmological constant
|
| Well put!
| evanjrowley wrote:
| I am reminded of LICRA v. Yahoo. Another puzzling choice of
| Yahoo's that seems very wrong in hindsight.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LICRA_v._Yahoo!
| thunderbong wrote:
| > In 1998, Yahoo turned down the opportunity to acquire Google
| for $1 million. Yahoo made six acquisitions that year, spending
| $107.3 million.
|
| > In 2002, Google offered to sell again for $1 billion. Yahoo
| hesitated and Google raised its price to $3 billion. Yahoo
| declined at the higher price. Google went on to become a trillion
| dollar company.
|
| > Yahoo attempted to acquire Facebook for $1 billion in 2006, but
| Mark Zuckerberg turned down the offer. Had Yahoo increased its
| offer by just $100 million, Facebook's board would have forced
| Zuckerberg to take it. Facebook also became a trillion dollar
| company.
|
| In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion
| dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo.
| jeffbee wrote:
| > In inclined to believe that neither would have become
| trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo.
|
| Yeah exactly. Also I would consider the Overture acquisition
| extremely successful because their patent lawsuit v. Google
| gave them 8% of Google pre-IPO. If held (which it was not),
| that is a substantial asset today.
| bn-l wrote:
| They had 8% of Google at one point and sold it?!
| jll29 wrote:
| You are spot on, but you are drawing a slightly wrong
| conclusion, IMHO:
|
| Yes, Overture what the best Yahoo! acquisition ever made.
|
| But Yahoo!'s greatest mistake was to settle the Google
| lawsuit for a few million dollars - which meant that Google
| could keep using Overture's (parented) invention of keyword
| bidding based advertising; without it, Google may never have
| found a way to become profitable.
|
| So Yahoo! bought its own gravestone for $50m, when all they
| would have had to do is stand firm and go to trial. If Y!
| exercised its government-awarded monopoly rights for keyword
| auction based advertising, there may still be that Y! portal
| that was so prominent in the early 2000s.
|
| PS: Yahoo Inc. is not full gone - Yahoo Japan remains the
| last independent part of the former Y! - see
| https://www.yahoo.co.jp .
| 1317 wrote:
| > Yahoo Japan remains the last independent part of the
| former Y!
|
| didn't they get bought by the koreans
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| well then Yahoo Korea is the last part /s
| morkalork wrote:
| Do you think any of their other successful acquisitions had the
| same potential if left on their own?
| blueboo wrote:
| Or even, did any of the other successful acquisitions have
| potential that was perceptibly curtailed by said acquisition?
|
| Feels like a cliche at this point, but I'm not sure it's
| true.
| mongol wrote:
| It is an interesting thought experiment. Would Yahoo have
| become Google, or would another company have taken Google's
| place, or perhaps something entirely different would have
| played out. Would we have had Android? Would we have had
| Chrome, or Google Maps, and so on
| Mobius01 wrote:
| Now I want a counter factual story about Yahoo acquiring
| Facebook, which then never flourishes into the influential
| network it became. What happens to society? Would we have the
| same political climate?
| benrutter wrote:
| I want to know this too! If I invent a time machine, I'll
| message you but till then here's my ungrounded take
| (Obviously everything here is my personal opinion and not
| evidenced)
|
| The current political climate has mainly happened because
| capital interest has taken control of unregulated news and
| opinion. Meta are a particularly bad example of this, but as
| long as there's money to be made by providing a platform for
| polarising politics and fake news, then I think someone will
| do so.
|
| Who knows, maybe in that alternate universe you'd be posting
| "if Yahoo hadn't made such savy choices, I wonder if we would
| have the political climate we have today?"
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| > The current political climate has mainly happened because
| capital interest has taken control of unregulated news and
| opinion
|
| This has always been the case for as long as society has
| been consuming the news. "Business tycoons" have bought up
| newspapers and media outlets since forever to push their
| narrative.
|
| I think one component that has changed is the sheer volume
| and diversity of media makes competition for your attention
| (clicks) all the more fierce. Enter The Algorithm and
| optimizing for metrics above all else.
|
| I dunno. That doesn't invalidate anything about the
| original question about what present day would be like
| without Facebook. Would something else similar have
| replaced it? Is Facebook really "the problem" or is it
| algorithmic content because algorithmicly driven content
| was going to happen facebook or not.
| trueismywork wrote:
| We would have had something else with same effect. The age
| was ripe with social media, orkut, Facebook, MySpace, and so
| many others I cannot even remember.
| smelendez wrote:
| That's my thought.
|
| One analogy is local news media ecosystems across the US,
| which have generally looked pretty similar though not 100%
| identical over the past ~125 years or so, suggesting some
| determinism based on broader culture and technology.
|
| If Facebook had stumbled, something else would have gotten
| the next microgeneration of college students and then their
| parents and grandparents.
|
| It's possible to me that an independent Instagram would
| have filled Facebook's niche a few years later, and
| something like Snapchat would have taken the current
| Instagram niche. Maybe Twitter would have played a
| different role.
|
| It's also possible a web 2.0 answer to classmates.com would
| have grabbed the older crowd, and we'd have a slightly more
| profound age split.
|
| But ultimately I think we'd end up where we are -- a set of
| platforms algorithmically curating feeds of user-generated
| content -- with a few cosmetic differences.
| iwanttocomment wrote:
| I feel like SOUTHLAND TALES, a movie written and shot before
| the iPhone was released, is quite helpful here. The movie
| emphasizes all of our post-9/11 failings in American culture
| at a time before Facebook or Twitter or any of the social
| media nonsense people blame the current awfulness on. The
| problems we face as Americans are far deeper than "cell
| phones" or "the Internet".
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Yahoo could have been society's loss leader.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| No it would just be a bunch of happy people messaging each
| other on Yahoo Messenger. We were never meant to see the
| inside of the brain of the average human put on public
| display.
| fnord77 wrote:
| > Would we have the same political climate?
|
| that's exactly where my thoughts went
| nkrisc wrote:
| I think something roughly Facebook-shaped was inevitable.
| pilingual wrote:
| Inclined because, for example, Viaweb didn't become Shopify.
|
| Tumblr, del.icio.us, ROI. Probably all should have continued
| growing and becoming established properties.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Delicious was the only useful bookmark manager ever. Nothing
| ever came close to replacing it. Though for me the "social"
| part was pretty useless (plenty of actual link aggregators
| out there to discover content at the time)
|
| ...god remember the "tags" phase of content organization?
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Delicious was cool because of the constant streaming of
| links and things that I was able to discover back then. I
| would sit there and just click on links, finding good
| content
| paradox460 wrote:
| Flickr was the Instagram of it's era. It could have
| maintained that crown if Yahoo gave half a duck about it
| skizm wrote:
| I guess the question is how many other companies did they
| correctly identify as not being trillion dollar companies. They
| will be optimizing for different things than VCs. Also, it is
| very possible they would have run one or both into the ground,
| making them bad investments anyways. We like to dunk on Yahoo
| with our perfect hindsight, but they were probably reasonable
| decisions at the time. So yes I agree with this comment.
| pyman wrote:
| The truth is that bad leadership and no clear vision led to
| Yahoo's decline. They went through over half a dozen CEOs in
| a short span and each had a different strategy.
|
| They failed to buy Google and Facebook, instead they bought
| GeoCities, Tumblr, and Broadcast for billions and ran them
| into the ground.
| fuzztester wrote:
| I was on geocities and tumblr for a while, long back.
|
| I never liked Tumblr.
|
| there is neocities now.
|
| what was broadcast about?
| pyman wrote:
| Broadcast = An early version of Spotify, Netflix and
| YouTube
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'm inclined to agree.
|
| I'm ambivalent as to _how_ they became trillion-dollar
| behemoths, but I think that Yahoo would have strangled them in
| the crib; possibly, deliberately.
|
| I've seen exactly that kind of thing happen, before.
| bena wrote:
| Exactly. If Yahoo was capable of nurturing Google into what it
| became, it was also capable of simply becoming that first. But
| it didn't, because it wasn't run by the same people who ran
| Google.
|
| And I'm not saying that only Page and Brin were the only ones
| who could have made Google, only that they clearly were two
| people who were capable of doing it. However, Yahoo was not run
| by such people. So Yahoo would have bought Google and would
| have made Google conform to Yahoo's culture, probably
| relegating Page and Brin to lesser roles where they couldn't
| drive company culture.
| Jabbles wrote:
| "Facebook's board would have forced Zuckerberg to take it"
|
| Doesn't Zuckerberg have majority control?
| dpe82 wrote:
| Sure; but (IIRC) at the time Facebook was burning cash and
| the board could have threatened future funding if he refused
| the offer. He may have been able to get more funding anyway
| but the larger point is these things are never as simple as
| the legal docs might imply.
| fuzztester wrote:
| In 2008:
|
| https://news.microsoft.com/source/2008/02/01/microsoft-propo...
|
| So for about $44 billion.
|
| I had read the news at the time on multiple channels.
|
| They didn't take the offer.
| dh2022 wrote:
| The follow-up after Jerry Yang initially refused Ballmer:
| somehow Jerry had a come-to-Jesus moment and decided to sell
| but by then Ballmer changed his mind. Jerry even chased
| Ballmer on a golf course trying to sell but to no avail.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/2008/5/jerry-and-steve-
| playe...
| croes wrote:
| Hindsight is 20/20.
|
| How successful were the six companies they aquired?
| alberth wrote:
| > _Had Yahoo increased its offer by just $100 million,
| Facebook's board would have forced Zuckerberg to take it._
|
| Is that true?
|
| Zuck still controls 57% of all voting shares and that's today,
| yearly 20-years later.
|
| How could the Board force him to sell to Yahoo.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/zuckerberg-motivates-s...
| btilly wrote:
| _In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion
| dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo._
|
| I absolutely agree.
|
| One fundamental reason why Yahoo failed is that they
| prioritized short-term revenue from search partners, over long-
| term reputation. One of the key people behind that was
| Prabhakar Raghavan.
|
| And now, Prabhakar Raghavan is at Google. Where he has
| proceeded to make the same mistake, with the result that Google
| Search quality fell off of a cliff.
|
| If Google had been acquired by Yahoo, he would have been in a
| position to destroy Google earlier than he actually did.
|
| See https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ for
| more.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| There is no strong method for predicting the future.
| Acquired/could have acquired in particular doesn't have
| predictive ability.
|
| "Acquiring" is meaningless. Even "plans for the company after
| the acquisition" is meaningless. Credible reports of
| motivations that would lead the acquiring company to take a
| hands off approach to the company acquired means at least a
| little bit, having now seen companies taking that approach not
| immediately killing the golden goose.
| Macha wrote:
| > In inclined to believe that neither would have become
| trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo.
|
| Having worked for Yahoo, I have to agree. Acquisitions were
| always seen in terms of "what can they do for the Yahoo brand?"
| and "How can we cut costs by migrating this to Yahoo tech?",
| not "How can we grow this business?". A Yahoo owned Facebook
| would have been suffocated like Tumblr and Flickr were.
| nertzy wrote:
| I am still a Yahoo! pinger as well. ~ ping
| yahoo.com PING yahoo.com (74.6.231.20): 56 data bytes
| 64 bytes from 74.6.231.20: icmp_seq=0 ttl=50 time=42.366 ms
| ^C --- yahoo.com ping statistics --- 1 packets
| transmitted, 1 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-
| trip min/avg/max/stddev = 42.366/42.366/42.366/0.000 ms
| oreilles wrote:
| I just tried, pinging Yahoo is about 20 times slower than
| pinging Google...
| econ wrote:
| I wasn't there but from talking with people working there it was
| a culture of waiting for the next paycheck and staying under the
| radar, not caring and not doing much work.
|
| Some 20-30 people I chat with were all the kind you should
| immediately fire and escort out of the building. Some had their
| next job lined up already just in case. lol
| jjbinx007 wrote:
| It was only just over a decade ago I used to play lots of the
| online games hosted on Yahoo and it was great! I had just started
| dating my (now) wife and we used to hang out every evening in an
| online video conference and play online versions of Pool, Risk
| etc, and as it was all inside Yahoo's ecosystem we only had to
| login once and we could automatically play each other.
|
| Going further back, Yahoo's web directory was also a good and fun
| way to explore the world wide web. When Google appeared, and its
| search was so good, the concept of "people don't need bookmarks
| any more" seemed to spread, but in the process the joy of
| discovery was lost. Rather like how browsing DVDs in Blockbuster
| means you could find something really cool by accident, but
| searching a database means you have to have an idea what you want
| to find to begin with.
| zippyman55 wrote:
| To me, Yahoo always seemed more trustworthy than Google or
| Facebook.
| distances wrote:
| I started using Internet actively around 1996 or so. For me
| Yahoo practically didn't even exist, their homepage was a
| hodgepodge of everything and I couldn't figure out why I would
| go there. My search usage was mainly AltaVista with some
| HotBot, Northern Light, and Raging Search mixed in. But never
| Yahoo.
| mkagenius wrote:
| Just checked Marissa Mayer's X account, can someone explain why
| is her account not getting enough views/reach -
| https://x.com/marissamayer
|
| She apparently has 1.4M followers with barely 20 likes. This was
| even worse a few months back.
|
| Are those followers bought / dormant? Or is twitter suppressing
| it?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Nobody currently uses Twitter so follower count implies
| nothing. Lots of notorious figures have posted regarding how
| they get the same interaction rate on Bluesky even though they
| supposedly have 10x or even 1000x more followers on Twitter.
|
| For example:
| https://bsky.app/profile/brandonfriedman.bsky.social/post/3l...
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| It's a ghost town for anything substantive, if she's not
| shouting about culture war stuff she's not likely to get much
| engagement.
| eastbound wrote:
| I can't, but influence is bought and temporary. People aren't
| found off the person, but what she represents in society. And
| since she spent 8 years buried at Yahoo!, busy executing the
| winddown plan (masterfully), she may have inadvertently
| communicated that she's expert in liquidation. Not something
| you follow when you want to know what the future is.
|
| (Insert a distasteful joke about how she would have made a
| killing at DOGE).
| blitzar wrote:
| Twitter is all bots.
| drewg123 wrote:
| I do miss them being one of the biggest FreeBSD contributors. For
| a long time in the late 90s / early 2000s Yahoo was to FreeBSD
| what Netflix is now (and maybe a bit more). They used to host a
| lot of the FreeBSD build/test infrastructure and employed several
| src committers and they contributed heavily to a LOT of work that
| has made FreeBSD a viable OS going forward.
|
| For example, they contributed heavily to the SMPng project (which
| made FreeBSD into a modern, multi-theaded kernel with fine
| grained locking). They even hosted the kickoff meeting:
| https://people.freebsd.org/~fsmp/SMP/SMPmeeting.html They
| employed Peter Wemm, who did the majority of the work for the
| AMD64 (eg, x86-64) port. And lots that I'm forgetting about
| probably..
| chris_j wrote:
| What happened? Did they stop using FreeBSD? Did they continue
| to use it but jsut stop contributing?
| otterley wrote:
| Yes, we migrated over to Linux for a number of reasons, among
| them 1/higher developer mindshare, and 2/Linux had better SMP
| performance for the first decade or so vs. FreeBSD as we
| started to buy beefier multi-core and multi-socket servers.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| As a ex-Yahoo! from 20 years ago, I have a very clear opinion
| about the downfall of the company: Yahoo! had spent years
| structuring itself as a "media" company - not a technology
| company - but nonsensically, it also wanted to be Google. Yes,
| Yahoo! had parts of the company that were extremely
| technologically advanced, but they hired Hollywood execs and MBAs
| to run the company through the 2000s - people who had no real
| technological vision at all.
|
| Yahoo!'s greatest strength and primary role in the Internet could
| be summarized as this: It was the most _useful_ site on the web.
| Users relied on it for their start page, email, finance, weather,
| news, sports, maps, casual multiplayer games, forums, instant
| messaging, answers, fantasy sports, evites, photos, and an
| amazing amount of search traffic. It was a one-stop shop for
| everything you needed online. Maybe not the best in every area,
| but always pretty good.
|
| You know how Google starts and kills products constantly? Yahoo!
| rarely did that. It saw interesting business models, copied them
| or bought into them and kept them going and users loved them for
| it.
|
| And all of this was profitable, just not Google-level profits.
| Remember Jack Welch's mantra of GE not having to be number one in
| every market as long as they were number two or three and were
| profitable? At one point, this was Yahoo! and they could have
| remained relevant to this day had they embraced this role.
|
| But the company's divisions were siloed and competed against each
| other in a way that makes Microsoft machiavellianism seem like a
| Sunday picnic. And the leadership was obsessed with Google and
| wanted to outdo them, even though they had a completely different
| culture and mindset. It was never going to happen. Regardless,
| they ignored Yahoo!'s bread and butter services, confused their
| employees and customers, and generally ran the company into the
| ground.
|
| Yahoo! needed strong leadership that understood the company's
| strengths and built on them to continue to be useful to web
| users. Sadly, that never happened.
| dh2022 wrote:
| Besides HN, Yahoo is still my only other news portal. (Yes, I
| am that old.)
| thijson wrote:
| I remember in the late 90's switching from yahoo to google
| because google's search results were better. I also set my
| homepage to google because the homepage was so fast to load, it
| wasn't all cluttered up like the yahoo homepage.
|
| I remember when I saw google for the first time, it was while
| searching for stuff on the redhat website, and I saw the
| Gooooogle at the bottom. I guess google had indexed the website
| for them. That led me to check out the google web site itself.
|
| I think at some point that google was indexing the web for
| yahoo, I could be wrong though.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| Everyone is a genius writing what went wrong but never have the
| guts to short it as it unfolds.
| WA wrote:
| I agree and would've written the same several years ago.
| Unfortunately, shorting is expensive and you have to get the
| timing right, too, not only the direction of the stock. If
| you're early when shorting, you're still wrong.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Also a slow decline is not lucrative enough in comparison to
| the risk.
| figital wrote:
| del.icio.us was my favorite tool on the internet for a few years
| (perhaps even still in retrospect). And not far off from the same
| functionality as Facebook (today). Why purchase such a thing to
| shut it down?
|
| Money which needed to be burned I guess (for accounting tricks).
| can16358p wrote:
| Yahoo literally did every wrong move and turned every move that
| could make it become successful again down, almost as if it
| deliberate. I can't believe it still exists.
| reacweb wrote:
| I think that Marissa Meyer had given yahoo back a bit of its
| lustre. That meant cutting dividends in favour of investment.
| Restoring a reputation takes time. I stopped taking an interest
| when she was ousted by impatient shareholders. I am not an
| insider, maybe I am wrong.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| Yahoo is still quite popular in Japan.
| nbf_1995 wrote:
| Yahoo Japan is a different company to Yahoo.
| HardCodedBias wrote:
| I think Yahoo faded into irrelevance since it viewed itself as a
| media company and not a technology company.
|
| Many internet companies fancied themselves media companies in the
| 1990s and 2000s. They all are on the scrap heap now, some
| examples: AOL, Yahoo, Excite@Home, Lycos, iVillage, About.com.
|
| The companies of the time that fancied themselves
| technology/infra/logistics did well: Google, Amazon, eBay/PayPal,
| Salesforce, Akamai, DoubleClick.
|
| Of course any lists like this have selection bias, so maybe I am
| wrong.
| GCA10 wrote:
| Yahoo did have a unique ability to smother any business that it
| acquired -- and I think the reasons go way beyond an inability to
| monetize them. In fact, I'd argue that it was actually Yahoo's
| fixation with short-term monetization strategies that eventually
| turned everything to dust.
|
| Consider Flickr, which Yahoo bought for about $25 million in
| 2005. If you're a tech visionary, you look at this popular little
| photo-sharing site and say: "Wow, everyone's connectivity speeds
| are soaring, and we could morph this into a video site, too!" And
| then, maybe, you've invented YouTube.
|
| Or, you look at the way Friendstr and Facebook are getting
| traction, and you say: "Wow, what if we built out easier
| commenting and a social-network feed with abundant sharing of
| popular photos among users' pals?" And then maybe you've invented
| Instagram.
|
| But Yahoo's metrics-driven managers refused to stretch their
| brains in this direction. I've been told by two famous-name
| insiders at the time that Yahoo's approach to everything was to
| set short-term targets focused on existing metrics, with rigid
| focus on hitting quarterly targets. It was all about driving
| orderly growth of what was already there, rather than any desire
| to explore new and uncharted areas.
|
| In essence, Yahoo had a Silicon Valley address but a Battle
| Creek, Mich., mindset. Purple logo aside, Yahoo owed a lot more
| to the way W.W. Kellogg had been running its cereal business for
| decades, as opposed to anything going on in the 650 area code.
| katzgrau wrote:
| As a Y! employee for a couple of years - although my time was
| brief, I can say with confidence that had Yahoo successfully
| acquired Google or Facebook, both would have been destroyed in
| short order.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Yes, but that just makes me wish it had happened...
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Wish they'd been bought by MS, probably would have sidelined
| them. Was a really bad deal from memory.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Another football in the Verizon Yahoo/Shuffle are those Verizon
| customers who were sold to Frontier but had verizon.net email
| addresses.
|
| Verizon kept control of those lightly-maintained email accounts
| and pushed them into the Yahoo/AOL infrastructure. Users with a
| verizon.net email address had webmail access at mail.aol.com.
|
| Verizon didn't make life easy. They changed POP/IMAP/SMTP servers
| every year or so. Just this May they changed again, from
| smtp.mail.yahoo.com to smtp.verizon.net - but the old servers
| still worked until the AOL outage 2 days ago.
|
| During the years in between, customers got caught between AOL's
| mandate to use OAuth and Microsoft's refusal to support it in
| Outlook.
|
| FF to now-ish and Verizon is purchasing those same FiOS customers
| back again. One more smack with the Verizon ping-ping paddle.
| DmitryOlshansky wrote:
| I recall the Zookeeper paper from Yahoo scientist which basically
| details a more useful version of Google's chubby. I find
| reliability and design of Zookeeper fascinating these days cool
| kids use etcd mostly because of relatively complex protocol of
| Zookeeper (there is a few implementations but they lack the
| polish of Java client).
| JLO64 wrote:
| Does anyone have a good book recommendation on Yahoo? I'd love to
| read more on the people who ran it into the ground.
| ogou wrote:
| An underreported part of the Yahoo story is its relationship to
| India. I worked there during the Verizon years and heard the
| history. Yahoo was a forerunner of the "offshoring" of technology
| jobs to India. It moved lots of core operations to a small army
| of engineers there. They figured out that their American
| counterparts made substantially more money than they did,
| especially the middle managers. Waves of Indian employees began
| moving to Santa Clara and getting market rate wages. Suddenly,
| Yahoo wasn't saving as much money as they used to. I don't think
| it was a major factor in its overall financial decline, but it
| had some effect I'm sure. On a side note, I heard a couple of
| Indian engineers say they were moving back to raise their kids
| because they didn't like the cultural influences in our schools.
| There were many interesting lunchtime conversations about things
| like that.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| It was run by people who didn't have a clue what they were doing,
| the engineers were excellent if a little risk averse (e.g. cvs
| and subversion were kept around for too long, PHP etc.).
|
| The people running it were the type of people who are taught to
| ruthlessly look at a spreadsheet and decide if Coca Cola can
| invest X in marketing and product development they can expect to
| get Y back with reasonable accuracy. Of course with software
| small teams can do big things so these calculations are almost
| impossible.
|
| Investing a billion dollars in your search engine in ~2005 might
| be considered insane of course. We were told by Carol Bartz at an
| all hands that they had done the work on their spreadsheets and
| they could not compete with the investment Microsoft and Google
| were planning. It still annoys me to this day that there was no
| discussion or attempt to decide if the engineers and the company
| were up for the challenge with Google. I'm not saying Yahoo!
| would have won, but to not even have bothered trying still
| irritates me - where is your vision? where is your fight?
|
| Anyway this is my take on it, the management decided to just give
| up on being technically excellent and being a software company at
| some point. The mind boggles why you would do this while software
| was eating the world and you had loads of fantastic engineering
| talent... \2p.
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