The Decline of Yahoo in Its Own Words | Hacker News Reader

The Decline of Yahoo in Its Own Words

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>Rather, Yahoo’s existing products didn’t work on mobile.

I wonder what this is referring to. All the Yahoo products I'm familiar with (admittedly not many of them), could be adapted to mobile. Yahoo Answers could have become completely addictive if easily accessible. Looking at a list of all their other services on Wiki, I can't find a single one that "[wouldn't] work on mobile".

The phrase "didn't work" is a cop out. If something "won't work" or "isn't possible", then you just haven't thought of a good way to make it. Don't pretend like things can't adapt and change.

Yeah, that assertion is baffling. Flickr is a photo service, it absolutely could've worked well on mobile...one of the first paid apps I ever bought was a third-party app that made it easier to use Flickr. Flickr famously was caught unawares by the trend set by Instagram and, well, Hipstamatic. In the news business, Yahoo News is very well known. Again, nothing inherently un-mobile about that product.

Perhaps few of Yahoo products seem addictive enough to be mobile breakthroughs, but that seems like a chicken and the egg thing. I liked using Twitter a lot from the desktop, but having it accessible via phone made it even more addicting.

The Flickr mobile app is a great example of where things went wrong for Yahoo. They both were too slow to spot a trend and poor at executing once they had. Ironically, from 2008 onwards, there was a module on the Flickr homepage showing the most popular cameras people were using. iPhone topped this chart somewhere around 2009 and yet they still didn't take that seriously enough to invest heavily in the iOS app development.

And even worse, rewind to 2008 and the Flickr API was considered the gold standard of API design. There were books written about it and it was regularly mentioned at conferences.

They had all the pieces to build a great mobile experience. The interest and support wasn't there from the leadership.

And the Flickr redesign guy went on to ruin Chowhound.

I don't think Flickr had any interest in becoming yet another gallery app. It always marketed itself as a place of photography with above average content from professional and hobbyist photographers. As a photographer who uses Flickr I'd almost guarantee that if Flickr put emphasis on mobile photography a lot of DSLR and Analog users would leave. I sure would.

I got hung up on it too. My sarcastic thought was, "yeah, nobody on mobile uses their device for messaging, e-mail, photo sharing, dating, fantasy sports, etc."

He means the usage patterns that mobile users tend to follow did not align with Yahoo's product offerings. He's saying they didn't work as products, he's not saying there was some impenetrable technical barrier.

Why is Yahoo Answers still in existence? I'd be embarrassed to run a service like that where the average question is looks like it was written by an illiterate, and three-quarters of the answers are trolls.

They did it to themselves. I was actually addicted to it back when it first came out (2006ish). I was young and some of my answers were probably more inflammatory than they should have been, but for the most part they were good. I had thousands of answers and was the top rank on a few sub-categories.

They banned my account. Not my Yahoo Answers account... My entire Yahoo account... email and main choice of Chat/IM since the 90's. I even called their customer service, who told me it was basically just gone. I lost a lot of lifelong contacts I'll probably never get back.

Their rules were made in a way that if you made enough posts, then the odds were against you. I saw several other top posters get banned for similar reasons, but I'm not sure if they had their entire accounts banned like I did. But, they did vanish.

It's kind of tragic to see them be late to the party that they helped invent. The first apps for the iPhone were powered by Yahoo and the YUI library was pretty usable on mobile early on.

The talent was there, the leadership was not.

Yui was amazing. Really paved the way for "proper" front end dev.

>> The talent was there, the leadership was not.

This is spot on and completely staggering to think about. Yahoo was there with all of the other big search engines. They HAD to have seen the landscape changing, they HAD to know what their competitors were doing and starting to diversify their portfolios and offerings.

And with all that information, what did they do? Nothing. they sat and watched their competition lap them time and time again, diversify, introduce new products, move to mobile, and create new technologies.

I am completely mystified to how this could happen at such a huge company with some very smart people working there. It's as if this was some grand pump and dump scheme for a group of investors. It's like they wanted it to fail.

>> The talent was there, the leadership was not.

Not according to Mayer who did a good job at making engineers want to leave Yahoo ...

Yahoo had all the products needed to be relevant again. What was needed is deep integration between these products. For instance, using Pipes in Yahoo Mail to create a custom Flickr feed. That's service integration. How about updating Groups UX/UI ? this product is obviously useful why does it look like it was made in 2000 ? Or is there so much technical debt that one cannot touch any code without having to rewrite everything at Yahoo ?

Was Yahoo ever big outside of the US? For me it's always been some invisible, but persisting, corner of the Internet. Admittedly I've used some of the services they have acquired (like Flickr and RocketMail), but none of the core products I think.

Search was dominated by AltaVista up until Google, and for news and website index services I would have used local papers and link collections. I don't really even know what else was in their offering.

AltaVista straight to Google? You missed out on some great stuff! What about Webcrawler, Hotbot or Metacrawler?

I remember trying out HotBot, Lycos, Northern Light, and the Raging Search (which was apparently also from AltaVista). But I didn't really use any of them that much, it was straight to Google if I recall correctly.

That was a while ago though and I don't have my browser history saved, so who knows exactly :)

Hotbot was my favorite. I even had an email address with them.

When they were bought out, I remember thinking "Damn, now I have to find a new search engine to use".

So many times at work, misspelling "hotbot.com" and typing "hotbat.com" which brought you to a porn site with some half-clothed woman suggestively holding a baseball bat on the splash page.

Pretty sure it was just a generic porn site (never really looked into it) and the "bat" thing was just a thinly layered gag to make an excuse for taking advantage of the common typo.

Heh, I just checked out whitehouse.com (not .gov!), which now says (with no images):

WhiteHouse.com Official Site

Celebrating our 19th Anniversary (1997-2016)

World's Most Famous Adult Site coming back Summer 2016

Was Yahoo ever big outside of the US?

Yahoo was, and still is, big outside the US. From my understanding Yahoo Japan is doing really well as is the company in other developing markets.

Yahoo Japan is a different company, I think owned by SoftBank.

They run a lot of services that are covered by e.g. eBay, Yelp, Google Maps here. I think they're an ISP too.

Yahoo is still big in Europe, at least France. Their homepage is one of the most visited webpage.

Apparently they're big in Japan as well.I remember reading a while ago that Yahoo is the dominant portal in Japan and scratching my head...

It's a different company in Japan. They Yahoo you know has a minority stake in Yahoo KK that is the Yahoo people know in Japan. The cell phone provider, softbank has the majority share.

Yahoo is still dominant in Taiwan and has always been strong in Japan as well.

How does Yahoo make money and how did its sources of revenue change over time? Ads?

In search, Yahoo was handily beaten by Google, and competing against Microsoft and Baidu for the rest. For webmail, Google won out, and Microsoft and Yahoo tried to hang on. For ads, Google and Facebook trounced Yahoo. Flickr was caught unaware by the rise of Instagram, and Tumblr resulted in them acquiring a massive social graph, but no clear ability to monetize it.

Facebook (& Instagram), Google (& Gmail, Youtube), Amazon, Twitter are all sites you'd visit while logged-in, so they can target ads better. Yahoo's properties no longer draw the volume of userbase that remains logged-in all the time, partially because you can get full benefit of their primary property (Yahoo.com) without logging in, and partly because fewer people use their gated properties in preference to their competitors.

But I'm not sure what they could've done to stop this. Microsoft is in a very similar boat, and their first attempt to adopt Google's strategy to get Microsoft content into everyone's hands faltered at the hands of third-party app developers. Their second attempt, with Windows 10, might succeed. Yahoo likely won't and can't take that route, so their hands are rather tied.

What would "computing in an AI-first world," in the context of moving from computing in a mobile-first world, look like?

I think he is just saying that machine learning is the next big thing (for real this time).

I often think, given the number of uses of Yahoo Mail, that a social network addition would have been extremely popular. I don't think the problem was ever mobile, it was not seeing that the wind was blowing to social networks and internalizing that. They even had the best photo site to post pictures on.

You just reminded me that I have a Yahoo Mail account... Its been so long since I've even thought about that...

Believe it or not, the reason for decline is Google and Facebook. It's called Ads.

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