Why Yahoo Couldn’t Adapt to the Smartphone Era

Not a big fan of the products he's in charge of now (Blogger especially), but maybe they're pushing a redesign :)

Ultimately, Yahoo is a company from another time that's long gone. Perhaps it's time for it to be laid to rest for all involved. Just a thought.

I do remember articles congratulating her for ending telecommuting, but I think that was more a symptom of management failure than anything else.

I would add though, that Flickr Mobile (which I worked on a little) was considered one of the best mobile websites ever made. However, because a certain executive had managed to get control of all of Yahoo's mobile experiences, we weren't allowed to innovate with mobile too much.

When a native Flickr app was finally released, I was no longer at Flickr. But I heard that it had been developed by a different team at Yahoo, and was a complete surprise to Flickr upon launch. The new app hit the "random" API so hard for their login screen, to the Flickr staff, it looked like a DDOS.

But I think we all missed on the opportunity mobile offered because we were trying to shrink Flickr into a mobile site. Flickr was designed for serendipity and rich experiences. If you were a creative person, looking to participate in a planetary social-cultural conversation, it was incredible.

Meanwhile, Facebook made photos into an accessory for the average person's social life. For creative people and dabblers, Instagram offered the best mobile experience; it worked with the constraints of the platform and even turned those into features.

Something of this dichotomy is still playing out with Twitter and Facebook taking opposite poles. Although it looks like Twitter has finally given up and decided that it's a Kardashian photo delivery system or something.

And for the love of God it's been 6 years and I still can't put a link to "Small business" on my "personal" page's sidebar. I mean, what the fuck? I have to have a personal bookmark, and now the link has changed to something I'll never remember if I'm at a computer other than this one.

Ugh. Yes, I am losing confidence.

Mayer doesn't need more time. She's a competent middle manager and an excellent researcher promoted beyond the scope of her talents, and she made the classic mistake of misunderstanding the difference between a popular platform and a range of products that users really want.

Now she's out of time and out of ideas.

I assure you grandma trying to look at pix of her grandkids on flickr could not possibly care less about the hiring and firing of the parent companies CEO. On the other hand nothing excites CNBC-watching investors than hiring and firing CEOs.

A long term guaranteed tank to oblivion is to amuse the investors without providing any value to back it up. They tried that, it hasn't worked. Time to switch and try to generate long term value by focusing on the users instead of the CNBC viewers. Its their only long term hope. Any other strategy is just trying to extract the most cash on the way down. Which may be their only possible choice if they have no way to generate long term value.

Something HN stereotypically has little experience with is mega-corporations. A UX designer's bosses bosses bosses bosses (repeat many times) bosses boss has no impact on their job performance. At a high level they have no control over low level operations in practice. If at low level yahoo is improving thats nice but has nothing to do with the CEO. At the high level they can buy, sell, start, shut down divisions or major projects.

Rather the opposite. If the keep her Yahoo will be dead. While existing problems were legion when she arrived, she hasn't made much progress. Yahoo needs a CEO who is willing to lay out a vision for the brand and ruthlessly pursue it. Anything else will just prolong its slow slide beneath the waves.