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Comment by mawburn | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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.

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.

And the Flickr redesign guy went on to ruin Chowhound.

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."

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.

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.

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