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I am having a hard time recognising any kind of strategy on Yahoo's part. Does anybody even know what the core of their business is? Are they a search engine? Are they some kind of media company? An ad agency? What is that they do? Meyer is seemingly done very little in her four years as CEO. She has shifted things around internally, fired a lot of people and acquired some things. But none of this seems to really go anywhere. The Tumblr acquisition was already a complete bust and has resulted mostly in write-offs. No technology company has ever dug itself out from a hole like this - no company except for Apple, that is, and it took Steve Jobs to do it.

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I'll never not be able to think of how they spent $30 million on a text summarizing phone app created by a 15-year old. How humiliating that must be for Yahoo engineers, who have put out great technology and frameworks (such as Pure, in the case of the latter) and could've easily developed this in-house...but few people ever think of Yahoo engineers in nearly the same light as Google or Microsoft engineers, and yet Yahoo is spending millions to further the perceived impotency of their engineers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_D%27Aloisio#Summly

Though on a nicer note, great to see that that 15-year old, who was already well-off before becoming a Yahoo millionaire, ended up quitting to go to school to study computer science.

Whilst at Yahoo, I was told going to University was a requirement placed on him by Mayer, not sure how true that is. Also that $30 million for the amount of publicity it generated wasn't a bad deal.

"Publicity"? You can get an insane marketing campaign for 30 million, that might actually have a chance in hell of generating revenue. What was the incremental brand awareness generated by lighting that 30 million on fire, and how much of it could have been accomplished with "only" 1M or so?

>"Publicity"? You can get an insane marketing campaign for 30 million, that might actually have a chance in hell of generating revenue.

You can get an insane amount of actual good product work done for 30 million, and even if you reserve say just 1 to 5 million out of the 30 for generating awareness (aka marketing), you actually have a hell of a greater chance of generating revenue and even, gasp, profits (provided your product is not some piece of fluff).

I remember reading a theory that this was a way to launder investment recovery to Li Ka-Shing while disguised as an acquisition and PR move involving a 15 year old wonderkid (with well connected parents)

Not just Li Ka-shing, but also other big-name investors like Rupert Murdoch, Stephen Fry, Yoko Ono, Ashton Kutcher, Brian Chesky, Mark Pincus, Josh Kushner, Joanna Shields, Vivi Nevo, etc.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/13/16-year-old-programmer-rais...

http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/15/trimit-summarizes-emails-bl...

> a way to launder investment recovery to Li Ka-Shing

Even if you hypothesize that he got all of the $30 million...does Li Ka-Shing care? That's less than .1% of his net worth.

His financial advisors might, even if he's unaware.

> how they spent $30 million on a text summarizing phone app created by a 15-year old.

Nick did not write the summarization algorithms, from what I've heard. He had a couple of NLP PhDs write the core algorithms, which he then bundled into an app.

Wikipedia says as much ("a summarization and artificial intelligence technology developed with SRI International"), but only in the lede, not in the Summly section.

Paul Graham had quite an interesting analysis of what went wrong http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html . I'm not sure that much has changed. Summary:

Yahoo for various reasons pitched themselves as a media company even though "If you walked around their offices, it seemed like a software company. The cubicles were full of programmers writing code, product managers thinking about feature lists and ship dates..."

"The worst consequence of trying to be a media company was that they didn't take programming seriously enough. "

"In technology, once you have bad programmers, you're doomed. I can't think of an instance where a company has sunk into technical mediocrity and recovered. Good programmers want to work with other good programmers. So once the quality of programmers at your company starts to drop, you enter a death spiral from which there is no recovery."

Since then various CEOs have announced various strategies and not that much has worked well. Apart from buying part of Alibaba of course.

Agreed.

The businesses they have their hands in, they do poorly.

Content? Most of the articles are from other sources and give you a snippet of the content with a link to the actual article.

Media? Again, their videos are curated from youtube and other video sites.

Search engine? They have one of the worst in the business. Mozilla uses it as their default, which is helping, but most times I run a query on Yahoo, I get frustrated so I'll go back to Google anyways.

Email service? Have you used the current version? I still have mine which has become a spam address I use now. The few times a month I go in and clean it out, it's practically unusable. It's clunky, it's terribly slow, and often times just randomly logs me out.

News source? Most of the news is click baity, gossip, or other "viral" news and isn't that deep. If I want real news, I go somewhere else.

I had no idea they have a Developer Network: https://developer.yahoo.com/ How much visibility does it get? Hardly any. I'm not even sure they're really courting developers. Most of their cool products like Yahoo pipes were closed down years ago.

Now throw in Verizon's offer to buy them. Maybe they'll have the balls to put the company out of its misery.

> Email service? Have you used the current version? I still have mine which has become a spam address I use now. The few times a month I go in and clean it out, it's practically unusable. It's clunky, it's terribly slow, and often times just randomly logs me out.

I'm a heavy user of their email service. Have been for years. Even paid for it for a while. It's not as snappy as gmail (which I use for work) but I find it very usable. The mobile app has improved markedly over the last six months.

I agree that their search engine is ... suboptimal. If you are looking for news or a common website ("where's that bank located?") it's fine, but for most of the searches I use for work, Google beats the pants off of them. However, if stackoverflow is in the yahoo results, it's usually the right answer.

Anyway, not an apologist, just a happy user of yahoo mail.

Have you done anything to improve your experience with their email, or are you just using the stock web version? I haven't used the mobile version yet, sensing it wouldn't be much better than the web app.

I might give it another look and try it on mobile though.

I'm using the stock web version (not the basic one). It's the one that is built on the bones of oddpost (so outlook-esque).

Honestly, haven't done much to improve the experience.

I did turn off the conversation view, because I don't like threading of my emails.

I also have (over time) memorized the keyboard shortcuts: https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN3578.html

Mobile is a different world. Still have ads, but just one at the top. It seems to get features before the web version (specifically when I reply to a message sent to one of my aliases, the mobile version was the first to set the 'from' correctly, but the web version seems to now). The only issue I've had with mobile is that sometimes I need to search for something twice, especially if I have cleared my cache.

The intersection between Yahoo's demographic and users on this site is the empty set.

But they're still #5 globally, and Yahoo Japan is #16 globally, if you look at Alexa. That's a LOT of users, and showing ads to all of those users is easily worth billions of dollars a year.

Hey, not totally empty!

I still use yahoogroups (for some lists I help with) and yahoo mail (haven't bothered to move, have a decade's worth of email).

I also use their search engine occasionally (and Bing's)--just trying to keep search from being a monoculture.

As someone else who uses Yahoogroups for a few things, I've been wondering how it's holding on (and when I might need to jump ship). It's got a massive userbase, but I'm not sure of active usage, and I also wonder if it would have been canned were it not for things like Freecycle making exclusive use of it. It certainly has an abandonware (more likely understaffedware) feel to it.

I suspect that most people who have been on the Internet for a certain length of time have a Yahoo email address. I personally used to use mine for ecommerce so my main address didn't get polluted by the weekly sales emails. Frankly I don't really bother any longer because Gmail tabs are good enough at filtering out the chaff.

Anecdotally, among people I know (many of whom are not in tech), I see very few personal Yahoo email addresses.

I do still use Yahoogroups for one organization I belong to and that's just because it's what existed at the time and there's been no reason to move off of it. I'm also a Flickr Pro member and would be sad to see Flickr go away--but that's more because it's a good source of Creative Commons photos for presentations etc. than because I really care that much for my own pics; I could move to someone like Smugmug relatively easily.

Does anybody even know what the core of their business is? Are they a search engine? Are they some kind of media company? An ad agency? What is that they do?

I think in an interesting way, this stems from their origins. They started out as a directory for the web. At the time, few, if any, knew what that meant.[0] And so it remains on up to today.

[0]Meaning, sure we could understand HTML and the protocols involved, but what were web pages, what sort of media were they meant to contain? What sort of things could they make possible?

People keep mentioning Yahoo Finance and fantasy sports, but I have zero interest in and knowledge of them.

They're top in class and very popular in the demographic of not you.

This is just a solipsist's world and you're just living in it.

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