[HN Gopher] What went wrong for Yahoo
___________________________________________________________________
What went wrong for Yahoo
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 244 points
Date : 2025-07-26 18:25 UTC (1 days 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)
| DonHopkins wrote:
| If your grandmother had wheels, then she's be a bicycle.
| iluvlawyering wrote:
| From contradiction, non-contradiction.
| 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.
| iluvlawyering wrote:
| A deflection.
| 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.
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| Tumblr was 2-3x bigger than reddit apparently at acquisition
| time (just looking at google trends). Now reddit is public at
| 27B market cap, and tumblr is virtually worthless. I don't
| think there's anything fundamental about tumblr that would
| have prevented it from being the one in the sun instead.
| They're not dissimilar, and they could've used those years to
| grow tumblr in whatever direction they liked if there was
| indeed something stalling it.
| sfblah wrote:
| I know a fair bit about this deal. Some massive percentage
| of Tumblr's traffic was porn. And, shockingly, Yahoo
| management did NOT know this when they signed the check.
| 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.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| It wasn't that bad when we had the Fairness Doctrine,
| which was removed in 1987. From there you could see a
| steady slide in US politics as polarization increased,
| from the Clinton scandal, to Gingrich and then Bush 2000.
| By the time Facebook hit it was already too late.
| rynohack wrote:
| The Fairness Doctrine had a very limited influence on the
| media in general. It's power has been vastly over stated
| as of the last 15 years.
|
| It was only applicable to broadcast media, and rarely
| enforced. Nearly all of the enforcement was on behalf of
| private individuals wanting free airtime to respond to
| negative new stories about them.
|
| In my opinion it's a very bad idea to want political
| appointees to decide when an issue hasn't been given fair
| news coverage. The very idea that there is only 2 sides
| to an issue reinforces the two party system that has made
| media so biased in the first place
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| It's because of the fragmentation of news sources that can
| now be customized to one's preference with any finely
| sliced political cant desired. Three television networks
| maintained a measure of neutrality in their reporting.
| Mainstream print media did too albeit to a lesser extent.
| Wackjobs had a hard time finding each other to form a tribe
| that would destabilize society.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| Before the rise of social media, the mainstream news
| ignored both things going on in minority communities like
| police violence and ignored rural America. The MAGA
| community and Trump himself bypassed the mainstream media
| because of social media.
|
| America has always been polarized - institutions just
| never gave them a voice.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > unregulated news
|
| For all of unregulated news's flaws, government controlled
| news would be worse.
| benrutter wrote:
| Yes, probably. But there's a spectrum. The UK has quite
| strict rules on air time to differing views (you can't
| air a climate change story which presents climate denial
| as the only opinion as news). I think those rules lead to
| a better system, not a more government controlled one.
|
| Ironically, we (the UK) have the BBC which is fairly
| literally, government funded (not controlled) news. It's
| much more even handed than a lot of commercial news.
| roenxi wrote:
| Britain's political culture is a bit of a disaster
| though. Kier Starmer was the best they could find in the
| last election and as far as I can tell even the people
| who voted for him don't seem to support him in the main.
| This time last century they controlled 20% of the worlds
| population and sat in a vast network of trade and
| technological innovation all feeding back towards the
| British Isles.
|
| Then through basically an ongoing refusal to engage with
| political realities they've managed to transition to the
| number 5 and dropping economy in nominal terms and,
| realistically, probably don't have the industrial oomph
| to back up the paper numbers. There was political debate
| recently over whether the country should even be able to
| produce steel. Per capita the picture is a bit worse, and
| on a PPP basis they're actually a hair below the European
| average. They've also managed to become relatively
| politically isolated because no view seems to have gained
| ascendancy over what their foreign policy should look
| like.
|
| Now it'd be unfair to blame it all on the present crop
| given the huge amounts of damage done in WWII, but it is
| a bit difficult for me to accept the trendlines of the UK
| compared to the recovering USSR countries or China/Taiwan
| while believing that there is a healthy political
| discourse. The high performing countries have done
| amazing things even from a standing start in the 70s, 80s
| and 90s. From such a dominant starting position, with the
| momentum of the old empire and technically being on the
| winning side of pretty much every major conflict and
| ideological UK politics seem to have done rather badly.
| The country is wildly average for somewhere that was so
| ahead of the game relatively recently and with so many
| opportunities to succeed in the interim and such poor
| quality of candidates allowed to hold power.
| gonzobonzo wrote:
| > The current political climate has mainly happened because
| capital interest has taken control of unregulated news and
| opinion.
|
| We're seeing the opposite, though. As the traditional media
| companies declined and the masses gained a greater ability
| to voice their own views, polarization increased.
|
| As someone who tries to avoid the news and politics, it's
| pretty easy to avoid the companies selling them. But I keep
| running into them because there are lots of users on Hacker
| News/Reddit/etc. who try to interject it into every
| discussion they can . Invariably, these people don't come
| at it from the point of view that they might be wrong and
| the other side might be right; they act like zealous
| crusaders on a mission to vanquish evil.
| benrutter wrote:
| I don't dissagree, but I think I'm using "news and
| opinion" more loosely. To my mind, facebook putting your
| sister's political rant into your feed above your uncle's
| fishing pictures, is a kind of wauly of profiting from
| devisive political opinion. Even if it is more subtle
| than the NYT publishing a think piece.
| mejutoco wrote:
| > the masses gained a greater ability to voice their own
| views, polarization increased.
|
| It is the bot farms voicing opinions IMO. For regular
| people one account equals one human, and it is a
| difficult feeling to uproot for many people.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| So polarization wasn't an issue when segregation was the
| law in much of the south with separate schools, water
| fountains, entrances?
| anomaly_ wrote:
| Haha what? It's the literal opposite mate. We've had an
| explosion of independent and non-capital aligned media. No
| matter what your brand of crazy is, you can find the
| "thought leaders" and community for you.
| edm0nd wrote:
| Yeah the explosion of the internet has allowed some
| conspiracy schizo person in the US to connect with
| another schizo conspriacy person across the world in
| Moldova to quickly find each other online and then
| confirm each others schizo beliefs.
|
| Believe in flat Earth? Are you a holocaust denier? Think
| the moon landing is fake? Is the government gang stalking
| you? Welp you are in luck, there's thousands of other
| people just like you and here is a forum.
|
| Kinda wild when you think about it.
| arwhatever wrote:
| Do you feel the urge to fuck your toaster?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25667362
| benrutter wrote:
| There's another comment along these lines too. I think my
| "news and opinion" phrase sounded like I exclusively
| meant mainstream news. But I was thinking more generally
| abouts "news and opinion content" like Breitbart, X
| comments, facebook rants, etc.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > then I think someone will do so.
|
| Yes, but, would they be any where near the level of what FB
| achieved? Take Truth Social as an example. It started
| because people wanted a place they get out of the larger
| group to dedicate to like minded. In this Philip K Dick
| style rewriting of history where FB was created by those
| behind Truth, would it have ever achieved critical mass?
|
| Just because someone else attempts to fill in the vacuum of
| something else not being there does not mean that it will
| succeed in filling the void. Truth only survives on the
| cult of personality, not because people really want to be
| using it or because it's like a good product
| kergonath wrote:
| > Take Truth Social as an example. It started because
| people wanted a place they get out of the larger group to
| dedicate to like minded.
|
| Not at all. It started because Trump was banned from
| Twitter. That's it. The whole point was to give Trump a
| platform. There is nothing organic or natural about Truth
| Social and if it is the symptom of anything, it's that
| some people just have too much money.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I kind of disagree in that the giving him a platform is
| just the cover for the actual purpose which is a way for
| anyone to shovel him money through a "legitimate" means
| to avoid any sense of bribe or quid pro quo. Very similar
| into how certain countries that wanted to curry favor
| made long term rental agreements for property owned by
| Trump. It was only slightly less obvious than dropping of
| bags in the oval office with $ marked on them.
| oc1 wrote:
| easy, man. there was another site called myspace back then.
| they would have won the game and the end result would have
| been nearly the same or worse.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| Poul Anderson [1] in its short stories _Time Patrol_ has
| this theory that the past can be disturbed to some extend,
| some things have to happen independently of particular
| individuals or events.
|
| As a let down as it is for readers interested in how the
| author handles and solves time paradoxes (it is better than
| the insipid and sloppy multiverse solution, though) - _Time
| Patrol_ are mostly history-focused action stories - this
| theory makes sense to me. At some point the world gets
| "ready" to discover things because all the pieces of the
| puzzle are in its hands. In the case of Facebook, I believe
| it is not an accident or "because Zuckerberg"; a massive
| social network had to emerge, in particular due to network
| effects.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poul_Anderson
| JustExAWS wrote:
| Yes because before the current media landscape, politicians
| didn't win elections by using dog whistles (Willie Horton),
| making some out group the villain or "segregation now.
| Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever".
|
| Why are people acting like this is ancient history when my
| still living parents grew up in the segregated south and as
| recently as 2014 there were cities that still had
| segregated proms?
|
| This happened in 1985
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WErjPmFulQ0
|
| This is no media exaggeration. Forsyth county was notorious
| for this until the early 2000s. I (a Black guy) had a house
| built here in 2016 and sold it just last year when I
| relocated. While my son was one of the five Black guys in
| his entire school, we never experienced any issues so I
| don't want to cast any aspersions toward Forsyth as it
| exist today.
| 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".
| zaphar wrote:
| Those problems are American problems. They are human
| problems. You see them everywhere not just here.
| 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.
| elevaet wrote:
| Before Facebook there was Myspace and Orkut (which was huge
| in Brazil) - things were definitely pointed that direction.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Facebook's hook was that at first it was only at certain
| colleges, and then it expanded but I think you still
| needed an invite to join. In the early days it wasn't
| full of high schoolers and junior high kids like MySpace
| was. Facebook really used exclusivity and FOMO to drive
| viral growth.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I think so. Social networking was the AI of that era.
| eru wrote:
| > What happens to society? Would we have the same political
| climate?
|
| A different MySpace clone takes over the same niche.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Facebook is pretty bad for society, but Twitter has also been
| quite bad. IMO Twitter has always been the real problem.
| Facebook replaced Email as the channel of choice for your
| weird relatives to spread conspiracy theories. And that is
| bad, but it is just an enhancement of a constant thing.
|
| Twitter: all the journalists and elected officials signed up
| and decided the stuff that went on there Mattered and was
| News. The shitposts that showed up in their feed became
| social trends.
|
| It is a widespread failure, but if we had to pick a thread
| that we should call the start of that part of the unraveling,
| I'd point at Twitter. I mean, that's just the social media
| bit. Social media didn't cause, like, Afghanistan or
| whatever.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Yeah, all social media has been pretty toxic for society.
| But Twitter has been _especially_ bad. Turns out that
| requiring everyone to use very short messages means that
| interactions devolve into short, hot takes almost
| immediately. And then people just get angrier and angrier
| at each other as they fight back and forth via those barbs.
| Twitter couldn 't have done more to unravel the social
| fabric if they actively tried to.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| I think if bay area companies had behaved differently in
| early treatment of Facebook I don't think we would have ended
| up with such a paranoid/aggressive Facebook and things would
| have been much better, even if Facebook still became super
| successful. I think some of those early purchase
| attempts/behaviors are WHAT made Facebook the bad thing it
| became. Wonder if the juicy stories ever come out.
| 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
| MattSayar wrote:
| What's the superior phase of content organization now?
| dehrmann wrote:
| LLMs.
| mrkramer wrote:
| For me it was always: Google, YouTube, Reddit and forums.
| There are also niche sites that cater to certain groups
| and interests like Steam and Twitch for gaming or IMDB
| and Rotten Tomatoes for movies. There is no universal
| content discovery platform or engine(besides maybe
| Google).
| paradox460 wrote:
| Flickr was the Instagram of it's era. It could have
| maintained that crown if Yahoo gave half a duck about it
| smelendez wrote:
| Flickr and Instagram were pretty different.
|
| Flickr incentivized uploading a lot of photos with metadata
| and was highly searchable. It was great for photo hobbyists
| building a personal archive for others to peruse.
|
| Instagram was for smartphone photos and playing with
| filters to set a vibe, and ephemeral sharing with friends
| and people you wanted to impress. It's hardly searchable at
| all.
| al_borland wrote:
| It sounds like an Instagram style app, with Flickr as the
| backend would be ideal. People could still share for fun
| from their phones, while actually being able to find and
| organize old photos, if they wish.
| mrkramer wrote:
| You can do something like that but it must be an Open Web
| project. Walled gardens only care about themselves and
| their ad revenue.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >Inclined because, for example, Viaweb didn't become Shopify
|
| Who cares, it gave Paul Graham money for the Y Combinator.
| 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.
| manquer wrote:
| Yup It is power dynamics always, legal documents only
| matter in court.
|
| At the time in 2006 there were plenty of competing networks
| and any one of them could have climbed to the top.
|
| Facebook wasn't unique tech wise by all accounts one huge
| 20k line main file not like Google with PageRank or pegs
| viaweb written in Lisp or Amazon with early aspects of AWS.
|
| FB could have been replicated and with right money scaled
| by anyone else , the challenge was there were series of
| spectacular growth and failures in the social network space
|
| The tech innovations started first with Hack as a PHP
| compatible language couple of years later then things like
| relay , graphQL, react and so on.
| sthuck wrote:
| Where I live, the early Facebook apps were the killer
| feature of the early days of Facebook.
|
| Genuinely asking, what other software company did
| something like this back then? I'm tempted to say (tounge
| in cheek) FB was the original PaaS, but maybe im not old
| enough
| manquer wrote:
| Flash Apps hosting which was Facebook did then was not
| ground breaking at all, There were many other competing
| flash hosting sites .
|
| The killer thing others couldn't do Facebook did was make
| available social APIs for the app developers to integrate
| into their platform to make the apps viral, which
| benefited both them and Facebook.
|
| OG PaaS in the Web 2.0 age IMO was the google app engine
| , it predated all AWS offerings and gave an actual
| application runtime .
| Ifkaluva wrote:
| Recall that Kalanick had majority control at the time that he
| was ousted.
| Barbing wrote:
| Travis Kalanick of vibe-physics near-breakthroughs fame?
| function_seven wrote:
| Ha! I don't listen to the All In podcast, but I did see
| this:
|
| https://youtu.be/TMoz3gSXBcY
| 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...
| rasz wrote:
| Wasnt that deal pricing whole of Yahoo as worth minus billion
| dollars with Alibaba stock the only valuable thing in the
| package?
| 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...
| everfrustrated wrote:
| The board is in control of any company. Having the
| controlling votes means being able to reappoint the board but
| would have to do so by following the company's constitution
| which may take some time. For example, some companies only
| allow reappointing board members at certain times of the
| year.
| alberth wrote:
| I don't think that's entirely accurate.
|
| Isn't the Board supposed to act in the best interest of the
| shareholders?
|
| And if one person holds a majority of shares, wouldn't that
| mean the Board is effectively acting based on that
| individual's direction?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Why have a board then? Just let the shareholders vote
| directly on corporate decisions.
| chistev wrote:
| Yea, I'm really confused on this.
|
| Someone who understands it well should explain please.
|
| Like the Astronomer CEO that was forced to resign, could
| the sane thing happen to Zuckerberg in similar
| circumstances since he has majority share?
|
| What If it was something entirely different, could they
| force him out? I don't understand it.
| ksec wrote:
| Wondering the same, would love if someone could explain
| it. Hypothetically if Founder / CEO have 100% voting
| rights and all current public shares have non-voting
| right, the board could still fire the CEO?
|
| i.e The only way to prevent this from happening would be
| to stay private?
| shash wrote:
| The board is supposed to act in the interest of _all_
| shareholders, not just majority or controlling. Meaning,
| a group of minority shareholders could sue for
| discrimination as happened at Tesla recently.
|
| Also, I'm not sure of the ownership structure, but he may
| own 57% of voting stock but a minority of non voting
| stock, and the non-voting members may have certain rights
| irrespective of voting rights. I'd be shocked if they
| didn't negotiate some kind of escape hatch.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I'm still not seeing any mechanism by which they could
| force him to sell, though. Even if the board fired him and
| he couldn't replace the board right away due to the
| corporate constitution, how are they going to force him to
| sell his shares if he doesn't want to?
| Nemi wrote:
| Shareholders of companies are "along for the ride" and
| simply participate in the decisions of the board. In
| theory if they fired Zuck and appointed a interim CEO and
| directed that the company get sold, then it could have
| happened and Zuck would just be allocated his percentage
| of the value paid by Yahoo.
|
| In practice I would guess there would be lawsuits filed
| immediately to hold up any such activity until he had
| time to exert control of the board, but it would have
| been interesting nonetheless.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| So you're saying that in principle, the board could have
| forced Zuckerberg to sell his shares even if he didn't
| want to? It seems like it should be wildly illegal to
| forcibly deprive someone of their property like that.
| 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.
| throwup238 wrote:
| The HN discussion on that article has a lot of great
| commentary, including from some insiders:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
| antithesizer wrote:
| What do you do when you have a product whose value will
| inevitably drop in the medium/long-term? Squeeze every penny
| out of it while you still can. There is no solution to the
| SEO arms race, like there was no way Yahoo's blandly curated
| portal could stay relevant in the era of social media. He's
| the right man for the job. Google search has been doomed for
| a long time. It is another Yahoo.
| somenameforme wrote:
| LLMs have, for me at least, mostly replaced search. Because
| one of the most common things I search for is stuff like
| 'what is the function in [x] that does [y] in [z]'. Search
| for that on Google (or any other search engine) and your
| results will be complete trash. Search for it on an LLM and
| it's one of the few things they're nearly perfect at.
|
| Search engines, especially with the resources of Google,
| could have developed at least basically functional natural
| language search decades ago. Instead they chose to rest on
| their laurels (pagerank even still plays a significant
| role!), and secure market control by anti-competitive
| behavior.
|
| Google is certainly well on their way to becoming another
| Yahoo, but there's no extrinsic reason for it in the same
| way there was no reason for Yahoo to become what it became.
| In 100 years people will be searching the corpus of human
| writings (or whatever medium is dominant then) for
| information that's relevant to them. So there's in
| intrinsic reason for any search related company to just
| naturally die. It simply needs to keep innovating, or at
| least evolutionarily improving.
| starfallg wrote:
| > Because one of the most common things I search for is
| stuff like 'what is the function in [x] that does [y] in
| [z]'.
|
| This is also the type of search that Google makes no
| money from.
|
| The money is in searching for up-to-date relevant product
| information, where Google is the undisputed leader.
|
| >Search engines, especially with the resources of Google,
| could have developed at least basically functional
| natural language search decades ago
|
| Google is one of the major AI research outfits, and
| arguably the only one that continues to deliver
| consistently over the last 2 decades. Statistical Machine
| Translation/Google Translate, Adwords Quality Score,
| TensorFlow, AlphaGo, Attention is all you need
| (Transformers), AlphaFold all Google innovations.
|
| You can't really blame the prevalence of SEO slop on
| Google. It's not the lack of want of trying, it is hard
| technically (see how long it took to develop modern AI
| capabilities), expensive computationally (as we can see
| with the unsustainable cost of test-time search in
| ChatGPT) and in terms of user-experience.
|
| >Google is certainly well on their way to becoming
| another Yahoo
|
| Really, it isn't. Google is in the unique position of
| being the closest technology company to achieving full
| vertical integration of their value chain, from silicon
| to software to data to end-users. They are also at the
| forefront of frontier AI, including productising the
| research output. I don't really get the Google hate on
| HN, apart from maybe the YC/sama bias.
| encom wrote:
| >I don't really get the Google hate
|
| Easy. Google is basically spyware. It's an advertising
| company, and their product is you.
|
| >searching for up-to-date relevant product information
|
| I realise I'm not a typical user, but I would never trust
| Google for any searches hinting that I'm looking to buy
| something, because the results are almost guaranteed to
| be inorganic. Someone will have paid Google money to be
| promoted for "best clothes dryer".
| starfallg wrote:
| >Easy. Google is basically spyware. It's an advertising
| company, and their product is you.
|
| This is such a flippant and facile response.
|
| Google isn't a advertising company, it is a tech company
| that gets the majority of its revenue via selling
| advertising. This can change, and also likely to change
| in the next decade or so.
|
| The reason things are is that nobody was willing to pay
| for search - it's a product with a very low incremental
| cost. The market dictated this operating model, and
| nobody has been able to upend this model so far, not even
| OAI. The numbers just don't work out. Do you think OAI
| can continue to subsidise free ChatGPT queries with paid
| ChatGPT Plus subscriptions? Almost certainly not.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| How else should someone take the statement 'that is the
| type of search that Google makes no money from' when
| someone explained what type of searches they do? If
| Google doesn't make money from it, they don't develop it
| for search apparently, which is why they haven't
| progressed in search beyond advertising. You can argue
| that it needs disrupting, but concluding that 'they make
| their money from advertising' when that was directly
| stated by you is not flippant or facile, it is deduction.
|
| You can't eat your cake and still have it. If they refuse
| to develop an income stream that isn't related to
| advertising while using practices that use their dominant
| place in the market to buy other technologies or shut
| them down, then saying it isn't their fault that the
| revenue is only advertising is either disingenuous or
| naive.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Your answer sounds very artificial. For instance "AI" is
| in no way whatsoever required for natural language search
| queries. There was some spreadsheet program back in the
| mid 90s that even supported natural language operation
| description - and is something that should also be
| obviously supported now a days. Even the adventure games
| of the same era often had natural language interfaces. It
| was quite useable even if obviously severely limited by
| minimal R&D put into it.
|
| It was an obvious way to create a better user experience
| but instead search today is comparable to, if not worse
| than, search 20 years ago - because at least 20 years ago
| companies were ahead of the SEO guys, whereas that
| relationship has long since flipped.
| starfallg wrote:
| What makes you think that Google hasn't developed natural
| language processing, when they launched Google Translate
| in 2006?
|
| Also, what makes you think that NLP would solve the
| problem you're describing? Only LLMs has proven that it
| could fully understand and process the queries in the way
| you're describing, hence why I brought that up. However
| it is expensive computationally, and only recently was it
| even technically possible to do.
| bdangubic wrote:
| I will tell you all you need to know about Google - I was
| doing some research for a product I am building, my
| daughter (age 12) was an inspiration for what I am
| building and I asked her if she had time to help me with
| something and she did. Told her to "google ____" and she
| started laughing HARD and called me a boomer for
| suggesting she use Google... :)
| somenameforme wrote:
| Most searches, even in natural language, are extremely
| simple. Google could certainly have added this
| functionality, but they chose not to. This is how old
| giants always die. They become so obsessed with further
| squeezing their users that they begin to stagnate,
| decline, and eventually completely miss the writing on
| the wall - and face disruption.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Translate is not what most people consider NLP.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| > _The money is in searching for up-to-date relevant
| product information, where Google is the undisputed
| leader._
|
| Actually for products, a lot of people just go to Amazon
| has a thriving ad business.
|
| > _Google is one of the major AI research outfits, and
| arguably the only one that continues to deliver
| consistently over the last 2 decades. Statistical Machine
| Translation /Google Translate, Adwords Quality Score,
| TensorFlow, AlphaGo, Attention is all you need
| (Transformers), AlphaFold all Google innovations._
|
| The problem with Google is that they can't produce good
| profitable products. Innovation means nothing for a for
| profit company if it doesn't make money.
| AbstractH24 wrote:
| Google over the last 10 years or so (maybe even more) is a
| great example of the disruptor becoming the incumbent
| aydyn wrote:
| Google search _increased_ 22% from 2023 to 2024. You sure
| about that?
| evanelias wrote:
| An increase in searches isn't necessarily a positive
| thing. Anecdotally, I've increased the number of Google
| searches I do simply because it now requires _multiple
| attempts_ to frame my query in a way that provides the
| results I 'm actually looking for!
| simfree wrote:
| A decrease in search quality has damaged trust with the
| userbase, making crummy, unreliable data sources like
| LLMs seem much more viable.
| bitpush wrote:
| Are you just pulling this out of your ass? Per Wikipedia,
| Prabhakar R was not at Yahoo in 1998 and 2002.
|
| > After working 14 years at IBM, he became senior vice
| president and chief technology officer at enterprise search
| vendor Verity in 2004.[16][14][12] In July 2005, he was hired
| by Yahoo! to lead Yahoo! Research in Sunnyvale,
| California.[17] At Yahoo!, he worked on research projects
| including search and advertising.[15][18] In 2011, he was
| appointed as Yahoo!'s chief strategy officer.[1]
|
| > In 2012, Prabhakar joined Google after severe funding cuts
| in Yahoo!'s research division.[19] In 2018, he was put in
| charge of Ads and Commerce at Google and in 2020 his scope
| was expanded to include Search, Geo, and Assistant.[20] [21]
|
| It sounds like you are either unintentionally spreading
| misinformation, or misinformed.
| awithrow wrote:
| They never said he was there in those years or was involved
| in the failed acquisitions. Had Google been acquired then,
| yes, eventually Raghavan would have been calling the shots.
| 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.
| noAnswer wrote:
| So it would have been a net positive for society. :-)
| whynotminot wrote:
| Good guy Yahoo murdering companies that would have been net
| bad for society lol
| indymike wrote:
| > Yahoo owned Facebook would have been suffocated like Tumblr
| and Flickr were.
|
| This is really the story for most acquisitions in tech.
| Interesting that Facebook was able to really do positive
| things with WhatsApp and Instagram.
| dehrmann wrote:
| The story also mentioned Yahoo!'s best investment: Alibaba.
| What was different was Yahoo! was just an investor, not a
| buyer.
| kaonwarb wrote:
| I'm still sad Yahoo shut down Astrid [0] after acquisition - my
| personal intersection with the many, many small companies they
| acquired and shuttered.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrid_(application)
| flopsamjetsam wrote:
| > Yahoo! acquired the company on May 1, 2013 and shuttered
| the Astrid service on August 5, 2013.
|
| Ouch! That's pretty awful.
| xxr wrote:
| > In inclined to believe that neither would have become
| trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo.
|
| People also like to point to how foolish of Blockbuster it was
| not to buy Netflix when they had the opportunity to, but I'm
| also inclined to believe that the merged companies would never
| have made the decisive moves involving streaming video and
| content production. It's tempting to say that Amazon would have
| filled in the streaming video gap (although perhaps late enough
| for feature film and TV piracy to proliferate a little further
| into the mainstream), but I wonder whether Apple would have
| adapted its iTunes service into Apple TV first. (Another dark
| horse I like to think about here would be RealMedia which may
| have identified a niche.)
| neilv wrote:
| I used to joke that Yahoo were benevolent time travelers from
| the future, sworn to stop companies that would become threats
| to humanity.
|
| They would stop the company by buying it.
|
| Because Yahoo buying a company kills the company.
|
| If only Yahoo hadn't run out of money before... (certain
| companies that are now too powerful and ruthless to be called
| out safely).
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| > Facebook's board would have forced Zuckerberg to take it.
|
| Then what's that Zuck always having >= 51% votes since the
| beginning?
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| He did at the very beginning, but lost it because of dilution
| and then gained it back as FB became bigger and he could play
| investors off one another.
| rightbyte wrote:
| It is saddening to know how close we were to no Facebook and
| Google. Butterfly effect...
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| > In inclined to believe that neither would have become
| trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo.
|
| True, but they also wouldn't have developed into companies
| reducing Yahoo's reach ..
| al_borland wrote:
| After those companies didn't sell to Yahoo, they went on to
| develop new things, which led to growth. If Yahoo has bought
| them, they'd just let them get old and fade away, eventually
| shutting them down... or at best keeping them around with
| minimal maintenance. Yahoo is where once great sites go to die.
| nemo44x wrote:
| And yahoo! leadership agreed. They probably intended to just
| bury the tech and keep some staff which is why they didn't pay
| the asking price. Had they thought either of these properties
| were transformational they'd have paid.
| username135 wrote:
| And maybe the world would be a better place? We'll never know.
| indymike wrote:
| > In inclined to believe that neither would have become
| trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo.
|
| Having lived through several acquisitions - both as a founder
| exiting and as an employee being acquired/acquiring...
|
| Very rarely does the acquirer have the vision to see when the
| acquired company has a better long term trajectory. The CEO who
| does the deal might, but the senior management team and line
| managers usually just intentionally and unintentionally rob the
| acquired company of resources (cash, people, marketing,
| facilities) and then the exodus of smart people begins. It
| takes a very special team to make acquisitions actually add up
| to 1+1=4 most are lucky to get 1+1=0.5.
| 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...
| firefax wrote:
| I decided to run a small experiment
|
| ping -c 20 -i 5 google.com; ping -c 20 -i 5 yahoo.com [snip]
| --- google.com ping statistics --- 20 packets transmitted, 20
| packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip
| min/avg/max/stddev = 14.746/19.939/25.057/3.153 ms [snip] ---
| yahoo.com ping statistics --- 20 packets transmitted, 20
| packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip
| min/avg/max/stddev = 14.561/20.883/25.080/2.675 ms
|
| They look comparable to me?
| theshackleford wrote:
| It would depend on where you are pinging from and if they
| have anything closer to you to respond.
|
| From where I am, google averages 4ms, yahoo is at 200ms+.
| Obviously because they dont have the money or marketshare
| to bother putting anything for me to route closer too.
| jedberg wrote:
| Same experiment from my gigabit link in Silicon Valley.
| Looks like Yahoo is about 3 times slower but far more
| consistent
|
| --- google.com ping statistics ---
|
| 20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0.0% packet
| loss
|
| round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 6.918/23.419/294.037/62.272
| ms
|
| --- yahoo.com ping statistics ---
|
| 20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0.0% packet
| loss
|
| round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 78.056/78.940/80.940/0.811
| ms
|
| Although what's interesting is that Yahoo is really more
| like 10 times slower (almost every ping was in the 6-8ms
| range), it's just that there was just that one packet at
| 300ms and other at 30ms that really blew out the average.
| jen729w wrote:
| Shortest, fastest? ping 1.1
| ycuser2 wrote:
| What do you mean by "safest"? How is pinging 1.0.0.1 safer
| that yahoo.com? With pinging 1.1 you exclude DNS from your
| chain, but is that safer anyhow?
| jen729w wrote:
| You mis-read me. I said 'shortest'.
| qingcharles wrote:
| It's a muscle memory now after 30 years of doing it. Always the
| first thing I ping when testing a connection.
| 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.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Yahoo wanted to be internet's hotspot for
| everything....ironically enough Google become that despite
| the fact that they rose to power because of their minimalism
| and search focus.
| 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.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > It's a ghost town for anything substantive
|
| It always was. Twitter delenda est is a meme for a reason.
| 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.
| gonzobonzo wrote:
| I went back half a year in her account, and it seems like it
| was entirely re-Tweets and self-promotion? It would make sense
| if the algorithm isn't prioritizing that kind of content, or
| that kind of content isn't gaining traction.
|
| I saw she re-Tweeted something from Bryan Johnson. Looking at
| his account, he has less than half as many followers, but many
| more likes and a lot more engagement. But it's almost all his
| own content, and it's content that readers would actually find
| engaging.
| qingcharles wrote:
| There was an algo change a couple of weeks back. I saw a few
| accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers saying they
| were getting only dozens of likes on their posts. (mostly
| accounts that had dissed Musk, so factor that possibility in)
|
| I checked Mayer's account and it's not under any sort of
| shadowban that's detectible with the regular tools, which are
| usually very accurate.
| cenamus wrote:
| Free speech for me but not for thee
| 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.
| ksec wrote:
| I thought it was Marisa Meyer that forced the change?
| jedberg wrote:
| >Yahoo was to FreeBSD what Netflix is now
|
| Many of the Netflix engineers a decade ago, especially the ones
| that contribute to FreeBSD, are ex-Yahoo.
|
| Yahoo was dying when Netflix was growing, and a couple of the
| best engineering leaders from Yahoo came over to Netflix and
| brought all the top talent with them, and they gave them the
| freedom to innovate.
| drewg123 wrote:
| I've been there, working on FreeBSD performance since 2015. I
| wouldn't say "many" of the early folks. From memory, I think
| it was more like 2. Granted, 2 of the earliest. More of the
| early folks were ex Level3.
| jedberg wrote:
| That was in the openconnect team but we had a lot of ex-
| Yahoo throughout engineering. For example the entire
| observability team was ex-Yahoo when I got there in 2011.
| rr808 wrote:
| Hadoop too
| 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.
| LarMachinarum wrote:
| In all fairness, that really stands to reason: retrospective
| analysis is enormously much easier, more precise and less risky
| than prediction, for the simple reason that after the fact
| (especially this long and with lots of inside people having
| spoken up since), there is enormously more data available than
| before it went downhill. So it's much less a question of having
| guts than of having access to sufficient data to see enough of
| the whole picture.
| 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.
| drysart wrote:
| She wasn't ousted because shareholders were impatient. She was
| ousted because under her leadership Yahoo had collapsed to the
| point that the only thing left to do was to sell it.
|
| When a new CEO is brought in to right a sinking ship (which
| Yahoo very much was at the time of her hiring), their number
| one responsibility is to have a solid core strategy based in
| leveraging the company's existing strengths and then execute
| competently on it.
|
| She had no solid core strategy. Her strategy at Yahoo, as she
| described it, was "to throw lots of spaghetti at the purple
| walls and see what sticks"; which is exactly what she needed to
| _not_ be doing. She blew a lot of money on a lot of very varied
| things and ended up with lots of expensive puzzle pieces with
| no plan for how to fit them all together into something that
| would stop Yahoo 's bleeding.
|
| At the end, the company as a whole had a valuation _less_ than
| the company 's Alibaba investment -- she drove Yahoo not just
| to zero, but _past_ zero; and that 's 100% due to her not
| understanding how to lead a shrinking company.
| sfblah wrote:
| This is basically correct.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| Yahoo is still quite popular in Japan.
| nbf_1995 wrote:
| Yahoo Japan is a different company to Yahoo.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| Yahoo itself is still used more than almost any site on the
| web. Including TikTok
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites
|
| How much of that is people not noticing it's their default
| browser page? Idk
| esafak wrote:
| Does the Japanese Web still sport a 90s aesthetic? That would
| explain it.
| 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.
| bsder wrote:
| >And then, maybe, you've invented YouTube.
|
| _SUPER_ unlikely.
|
| Everybody forgets that YouTube was a _massive_ money loser that
| was floated by VC money. Had Google not bought YouTube, it was
| doomed.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| Youtube was also going to get buried under lawsuits for
| copyright infringement. Being part of a big brand gave them a
| lot of legal cover.
| GCA10 wrote:
| That's actually the point. Yahoo in 2005 had the financial
| muscle -- and an interesting starting point via Flickr's user
| base -- to spin up its own version of YouTube without needing
| to do an acquisition. Stronger Yahoo leadership would have
| stomached the get-started costs of an internal build-out,
| because of a sense of what this could become.
|
| Yahoo just lacked the imagination and nerve necessary to see
| how its own assets could lead to the next big thing.
| knallfrosch wrote:
| Yet Google failed to build a social network, Apple failed
| to build a car and Microsoft failed to muscle its way into
| the mobile market.
|
| And now Bytedance beat every US competitor, including
| Google's YouTube, Amazon's Twitch and Facebook's Instagram
| with what? An app that lets you upload 10s videos.
|
| Maybe it's not so easy.
| 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.
| rasz wrote:
| Nobody can beat Yahoo in making bad deals. Lets not forget
| they made Mark Cuban a billionaire with a legendary
| Broadcast.com acquisition at $10K per user! $5.7 billion
| dollars written off in less than two years.
| 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.
| sanex wrote:
| Customers who had sbcglobal and att email addresses ended up
| using Yahoo for email, which I always found ironic.
| ciabattabread wrote:
| > but the old servers still worked until the AOL outage 2 days
| ago.
|
| So that explains why my dad's email suddenly couldn't send
| outgoing messages (the configuration, for years, was
| outgoing.yahoo.verizon.net with normal password). After what
| felt like an hour, what worked was changing it to
| smtp.mail.yahoo.com and using OAuth.
| qingcharles wrote:
| It has caused no end of trouble for older folks who are still
| using yahoo.com and aol.com and sbcglobal email addresses who
| can't get any sort of sane support and are having a nightmare
| time getting into their email accounts that are linked to
| everything they've signed up for in the last 30 years.
| 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).
| zX41ZdbW wrote:
| There is a drop-in, protocol-compatible replacement for
| ZooKeeper - ClickHouse Keeper:
| https://clickhouse.com/clickhouse/keeper
|
| Many applications depend on ZooKeeper's data model and client
| libraries, and can't switch to etcd. Things like watches and
| ephemeral nodes are different there.
| gethly wrote:
| iirc problem of the zookeeper was that it was a chunky java
| application. etcd is tiny go binary. so there is more to it
| than just complexity of the protocol itself.
| 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:
| I think the issue was 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 ~2008 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, even with less money. 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 even 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...
| jackdawipper wrote:
| First Yahoo did Yahoo Serious, then Yahoo got did
| calmbonsai wrote:
| In summary, decades of failed leadership resulting in zero
| corporate focus.
|
| They're the epitome of a corporate melange of services and
| products that resulted in far, far less than the sum of its
| parts.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| In an odd turn of events I have ben one a regular user of Yahoo!
| despite how terrible the experience and content is. It shipped as
| a Safari default years and years ago and has remained in my
| neglected Safari bookmarks for no particular reason. I've
| recently reverted to using Safari on iPhone as my default mobile
| browser and used to rely on my recently used tabs for a quick
| dopamine hit. Several months ago Apple removed that from the new
| tab experience, putting my bookmarks front and center. So I use
| Yahoo. It's mostly clickbait content, heavily monetized, with all
| of the excrement of 20 years of AdTech on display. Ads routinely
| load in the wrong unit size, or with a double quote character
| that breaks the sticky container making it impossible to view the
| next page of comments. Most often the ads are mobile redirects
| that just crash the page and lose your scroll position. It's
| really a terrible experience to behold. At least I don't use
| social media.
| drcode wrote:
| I feel like the correct, boring answer is "they didn't focus on
| getting people the best website for what they were searching for"
| dehrmann wrote:
| This doesn't actually answer what went wrong for Yahoo!. The main
| insight is that Yahoo! saw that it made money from traffic, so it
| bought traffic generators without regard for if the traffic could
| be profitable. I buy this argument, but Yahoo!'s problem was
| _people stopped going to Yahoo!,_ and none of its acquisitions
| were big enough to offset that.
| esafak wrote:
| So you're saying their traffic generation did not work.
| sdrothrock wrote:
| I wonder what went right with Yahoo Japan, and how it was so
| successful here that it's still a mainstay for many to this day
|
| Related post I saw an hour after writing this:
| https://www.linkedin.com/posts/edmund-ho-1277b2125_yahoo-jap...
| jongjong wrote:
| I wonder how much macroeconomics and politics had to do with
| Yahoo's situation.
|
| During this period, the US had been exporting large amounts of
| dollars to foreign investors (US going into deficit) and these
| foreign investors didn't know what to do with all those dollars
| so they dumped them onto the US stock market. This has been going
| on for decades. It was the premise of the Japan carry trade.
|
| US companies like Google or Facebook would have had access to
| plenty of capital during this time and maybe it allowed them to
| be picky.
| kocial wrote:
| People blaming the acquisition failure by/from Yahoo for the
| downfall are misinformed.
|
| The reason for Yahoo's failure was its loss of dominance in
| search to the Chrome Browser.
|
| Google's few actions made Google what it is today, and that
| starts with a few most critical:
|
| - Launch of browser ( Chrome browser ). It didn't even become a
| meme against Internet Explorer, but also defeated Mozilla Firefox
| in its own game.
|
| - Acquisition of YouTube.
|
| - Acquisition of Android.
|
| They are already doing other crazy innovation that makes them
| dominate the Industry.
|
| While Yahoo was only famous for
|
| - Yahoo Answers ( Quora took over that ),
|
| - Yahoo Mail ( Gmail took over that ),
|
| - Yahoo Chat ( the golden days ), and this one - Yahoo failed to
| capitalise with the change of ERA, WhatsApp would have never
| succeeded, if Yahoo had innovated its chat and entered the Mobile
| app segment.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> The reason for Yahoo 's failure was its loss of dominance in
| search to the Chrome Browser._
|
| I'm afraid your timeline might be a bit off there.
|
| Yahoo outsourced their search to Google in 2000 [1] while
| google didn't buy android until ~2005 and chrome didn't come
| out until ~2008 [2]. And before google, yahoo had outsourced to
| 'Inktomi' and before that IIRC to 'Altavista'
|
| Yahoo wasn't even _trying_ to compete in search. This was the
| era of companies like "AOL Time Warner" where people thought
| web portals were media companies, and company bosses spooked by
| the dot-com crash were trying to diversify into tangible
| assets.
|
| [1] https://www.wired.com/2000/06/yahoo-goes-gaga-for-google/
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome
| lelanthran wrote:
| > And before google, yahoo had outsourced to 'Inktomi' and
| before that IIRC to 'Altavista'
|
| > Yahoo wasn't even trying to compete in search.
|
| Yeah. This is a common MBA-ism: focus on the top of the value
| chain where the largest margin exists.
|
| The theory itself is actually not wrong, TBH; it's just that
| Yahoo misidentified where the top of the value chain lay.
| They thought the top of the value chain was the users, and
| that sponsered content was the product. Google correctly
| identified the users as the product and the advertisers as
| the top of the value chain.
|
| IOW, Yahoo sold curated content (product) to users
| (customers). Google sold users (product) to the advertisers
| (customers). To Yahoo, the people visiting their site _was_
| the top of the value chain _if you 're directly pitching
| products to those users!_
| flappyeagle wrote:
| You made up a lot of history here. I hope the AIs watching
| don't train on this nonsense
| gscott wrote:
| I was searching on Google and the AI result was "According to
| Hacker News" then gave a huge result from the comments.
| Google is doing their best to disrupt themselves before
| someone else does.
| maltelandwehr wrote:
| I do not think it was just the bad acquisitions.
|
| Yahoo also turned from a tech company into a media company. At
| some point, every decision was made with a media company mindset.
|
| This includes making decisions that prioritize short-term revenue
| over building growth loops or enhancing user retention.
|
| Also, no investments into technology. Browser, CDN, proper web
| hosting, cloud - they missed everything.
| jaza wrote:
| I miss Yahoo Games. My favourite was dominoes, many hours spent
| in there as a teenager. The only Yahoo thing I've accessed for
| the past decade or so is Finance, the stock price info and the
| investing news seems to still be reasonable.
| farazbabar wrote:
| I interviewed at yahoo during the tenure of Marissa Meyer and
| decided not to join after noticing a strange lack of diversity in
| my interviewers (I saw a similar lack of diversity at Apple Pay
| much more recently), anytime top level organizations become
| infested by monocultures, it becomes impossible for progress, new
| ideas and innovation to take foot. It doesn't matter which clique
| or group has infected the organization by giving priority to
| conformity over diversity, it all ends the same way. This is not
| a call for institutional DEI, this is about being on the lookout
| for monocultures in innovative organizations.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| We had a really bad manager join my company recently, and the
| company has begun to go downhill. Many years ago, this same
| manager worked for Yahoo. I can't help but feel like this manager
| is at least partially responsible for Yahoo's downfall, in a sort
| of butterfly effect way.
| neya wrote:
| Whenever Yahoo! comes into discussion, no one talks about the
| other side of Marissa Mayer, the former CEO who fucked up Yahoo
| so bad. I had a friend back then who used to tell me how toxic
| the work culture had become in there. She apparently openly hated
| men and discriminated against them in the name of empowerment
| (and subsequently lawsuits were even filed). She was a glorified
| senior manager from Google basically who had no idea how to run a
| company. The Tumblr acquisition was proof. Most of the employees
| had lost faith in her after that acquistion basically. She, on
| the other hand, took away millions home while everyone who had
| invested their sweat equity and trusted her even one bit got
| screwed royally.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| I don't know the finer details of that, but weren't they
| already travelling towards obscurity by the time she arrived?
|
| Yahoo was a defacto entry point into the wider web and as
| Google gained popularity I think the average web savviness of
| people meant people had less reasons to arrive at Yahoo. Having
| a search deal with Google at least guaranteed their relevance
| for a while.
| BinaryIgor wrote:
| Really rare to find a company with such a bad luck, judgement and
| the cascade of bad decisions; it's strange that after all of
| that, they're still hanging in there
| RadiozRadioz wrote:
| Dotcom boom gave them one hell of a momentum
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Yahoo was structured wrong from day 1 to ever be great. At the
| core, it was a company with an unremarkable product that quickly
| became irrelevant as search engines took over. A directory of the
| internet was the naive kind of thing that required little skill
| or vision. That's what Jerry Wang built. That's what Yahoo was.
| Good idea at the time. Well executed. But not exactly rocket
| science. And it had a short shelf life and was soon forgotten.
|
| But it had money courtesy of lots of pre-dot com bubble stupid
| money that investors were flinging around. So it bought things
| that others had built to grow. And for a while that worked.
|
| It had more resources and toys than Google. But over time Google
| outperformed them on essentially everything it bothered doing.
| Better search engine, better mail, better news, better video
| (twice because Google Video was better than Yahoo Video before
| Youtube dethroned it), etc. These are all areas where Yahoo
| belatedly tried to gain ground through acquisitions and failed;
| over and over again. They always came in second or third with
| essentially anything they touched or tried.
|
| By the time Marissa Mayer (ex Google) came in, Google had already
| won and Yahoo was this big stupid conglomerate of many things
| that were kind of alright individually but clearly never going to
| add up to Google. And the rest is history. Marissa Mayer flailed
| for a few years. There were more acquisitions and a few flopped
| projects ran by her personally. None of it mattered.
|
| In the process, they ran Flickr into the ground. They ran Tumblr
| into the ground. Etc. They built a well deserved reputation of
| poor stewards of great stuff that landed in their laps. What they
| bought was quality. But they couldn't maintain that quality or
| nurture it.
|
| Yahoo is a great story how all the money in the world can't make
| you a great company if you start out being a mediocre also-ran.
| If you are running blind, because you have no vision, deals like
| Google and Facebook will woosh right by you. That's what
| happened. And arguably, it wouldn't have mattered, because they'd
| likely have screwed those companies up as well.
| senko wrote:
| A human-curated directory of the good parts of internet would
| be worth it's servers weight in gold today.
|
| Combine with modern perplexity-style answer engine and it would
| be far away from "also ran".
|
| Yahoo! had 99 problems, but human curation wasn't one.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| And I'm sure if Yahoo was still around, they'd be trying
| that. And failing again.
| chris_wot wrote:
| I think their CEOs were obviously why everything went wrong for
| Yahoo, especially Marissa Mayer.
| amelius wrote:
| Yahoo finance is still doing okay, I guess.
| jimmydddd wrote:
| And yet Yahoo! is still in the top ten in web traffic.
| dr_kretyn wrote:
| Did the author actually explain what went wrong with Yahoo? I
| mostly read through the thing but didn't learn much.
| 708145_ wrote:
| How about possibly also failing for being too US centered,
| basically being an "internet portal" but mainly for the US. Sure
| Yahoo where _huge_ 2000, but it was never the main goto portal in
| Scandinavia where I grew up using internet from the mid 90s.
|
| Here Altavista was the defacto standard for search until Google
| replaced. For the portal aspect of Yahoo, there were local
| alternatives with more relevant material.
|
| I don't see that Yahoo ever succeeded globally.
| ksec wrote:
| Every now and then, and especially in the past 3 - 4 years I
| really want to recreate Yahoo, or a curated Web Directory. Bring
| back the small Web, and a small gif for all webpage saying they
| are featured on yahoo.
|
| 95% of today's Web site are now complete garbage. And with AI
| written content I wont be surprised if this is now closer to 98%.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| What's ironic is that during all they time period and even today
| it's still one of the top trafficked website.
|
| https://www.semrush.com/website/top/
|
| Other companies would kill for Yahoo's traffic
| mathattack wrote:
| Could the issue be that they went from technical founder to
| spreadsheet leadership without having a hyper-competitive
| visionary?
|
| It's seems like they had plenty of genius and adults in the room,
| but no hyper-competitive Musk/Zuck/Ellison/Jobs/Gates.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >in 2008, Microsoft offered $44.6 billion to acquire Yahoo.
|
| Steve Ballmer was even more crazier than I thought.
| triceratops wrote:
| I can't tell who was crazier in that deal. Ballmer or whoever
| was in charge on the Yahoo side that turned him down.
| npalli wrote:
| Instead of saying what went wrong for Yahoo (default state and
| expectation), it is worthwhile noting everything that went right
| for Google and Meta. Alternate theories don't amount to any
| insight apart from hindsight is 20/20.
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