Comment by srslydude | Hacker News Reader

Comment by srslydude | Hacker News Reader

[edit: this thread has some insightful replies by others that are worth reading.]

I'm sorry, this may be PG's backyard, but I've gotta call bullshit. Note: I am not a Yahoo employee or corporate shill.

1. "At Yahoo this death spiral started early."

Apparently this death spiral took TWELVE YEARS (the WWW is 20 years old), and Yahoo is still #1 (or #2) in terms of total properties on the web. How is this a death spiral?

2. "If there was ever a time when Yahoo was a Google-style talent magnet, it was over by the time I got there in 1998."

Are you kidding me? You're implying all the current Yahoo engineers are idiots? Then how come each piece of code they release is revered, lauded and used by everybody?

Speaking of talent: Yahoo got best paper at EVERY data-related conference in 2010. No single lab(Google,MS) or university(Stanford etc) has ever done this. Clearly you can achieve this without talent, pg!

3. "In the software business, you can't afford not to have a hacker-centric culture. Probably the most impressive commitment I've heard to having a hacker-centric culture came from Mark Zuckerberg, when he spoke at Startup School in 2007."

Which company is responsible for inventing the term "Hack Day": Yahoo. Which is the only company to _promote_ hacking culture to students? Yahoo. Yahoo != Hacker-friendly? WTFFF!!! (edit:goog does soc, but it doesnt have engineers travel around the world teaching kids hands-on like yahoo does)

4. Google and Apple are shiny and get all the attention. Yahoo's the internet's underbelly. It's audience may not be SF hipsters, but they exist and there are a lot of them. Just because they're not like you doesn't mean they dont exist. Just because Yahoo doesnt cater to you doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

5. pg's product got hosed after inclusion into Yahoo. This happens. Reading a Yahoo critique from pg is like reading a Google critique from Evan Williams (Blogger), or a Google critique from the Dodgeball guys. It's a biased opinion.

6. It's a miracle Yahoo has survived for so long despite being criticized by the media /market for more than half its lifetime. The only other company that has had it worse was Apple, when they fired Steve Jobs. Yahoo doesnt have a Steve Jobs, and has been managed badly, but the engineering is SO GOOD that it STILL does a good job overall.

"1. "At Yahoo this death spiral started early."

Apparently this death spiral took TWELVE YEARS (the WWW is 20 years old), and Yahoo is still #1 (or #2) in terms of total properties on the web. How is this a death spiral?"

By this reasoning MS still has the best OS (and OS engineers) in the world and everything is fine and dandy at MS. They still have 90 % of OS marketshare and Simon Peyton Jones works at MS Research and he works on Haskell and writes awesome papers. How could Microsoft be "dead" as PG claims in another essay ?

The key to this puzzle is that PG uses "death" in a figurative, not literal sense, to mean irrelevance, especially a fade to irrelevance from a previously dominant, direction setting, position not complete physical extinction.

If you prefer, read it as "irrelevance spiral" and you would at least be reacting to what he intended to say vs what you understood by some overly literal reading. "At Yahoo this irrelevance spiral started early" can still be rebutted, but it needs a serious argument to do so.

As he said in his "Microsoft is dead" essay.

"I already know what the reaction to this essay will be. Half the readers will say that Microsoft is still an enormously profitable company, and that I should be more careful about drawing conclusions based on what a few people think in our insular little "Web 2.0" bubble. The other half, the younger half, will complain that this is old news."

Replace Microsoft with Yahoo and this is what you are saying. MS has great market share, lots of smart researchers and many conferences for programmers using its technology and so on. All that doesn't avoid the fact that MS is a shadow of what it used to be in the nineties in terms of technological dominance.

Some of your other points have some merit (but their impact is lessened by your tone imho).

I am all for strong debate and argument (it enriches us all) and PG shouldn't be allowed to get away with sloppy thinking, but you have to show that the thinking is sloppy. And the first step in rebutting an argument is to understand what was really said.

As for whether Yahoo is really hacker friendly, the best way to find this out is to talk to some hackers who work (or have worked) at Yahoo. I am sure there are many people om HN who have worked/did work there. (strlen for example)

From his comment

"Much of the knowledge did diffuse to rest of the organization and it's important to note that along side the "dot-com-wannabe-millionaire-vesting-in-peace" crowd the essay describes, there was plenty of genuine technical talent (anyone who has worked there can attest to presence and influence of hackers).

Unfortunately, for many reasons, that talent has slowly bled out. There was also a great amount of friction between Search and rest of the organization e.g., resistance (by Search engineers) to dog-fooding of what was often inferior technology. Search was, however, able to maintain a different platform, remaining on Linux, with their own platform/software stack, but were some "wtf" moments like porting and forcing the adoption of a custom user space locking library from FreeBSD when Linux already had futex (on the other hand, the fact there was a custom locking library built in a "media company" does say something).

The other key mistake made is that they would position bright, capable new hires in areas that weren't directly correlated to revenue and treated as cost centers."

This sounds like a company making mistakes with respect to technology.

(EDIT: See also tailrecursion's comment on his experience when he cae to Yahoo from Inktomi http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1596797)

(These are just anecdotes and not made to argue a point)I have friends on the Yahoo search team and from what they tell me, they did get crushed in terms of search quality by Google and though they caught up later (though not completely), they could never recover the lost ground in marketshare.

I know someone who argued at an internal "strategy conference" that Yahoo needed to close the technology gap with Google or they would lose Search to Google and was completely ignored (He is still at Yahoo btw, though he switched to being a full time manager as a matter of survival).

re:tone, yes, I'm taking a sensationalist stance because I feel the author takes one too. I'm aware this is detrimental to discussion, but hey, it's more fun this way! :)

re:interpretation of death, sure, let's call it irrelevance. OR let's even call it 'random variable x". The point is that pg asserts the company has been in "x" for 12 years. Which is 60% of the WWW's lifetime. It may be a decline, but I would not call it a spiral. at least of death.

re:research, I agree about orthogonality of research and company. This was addressing pg's point about Yahoo being a "talent-magnet" -- they indeed are a talent magnet in this domain.

I never implied all the Yahoo engineers are idiots. In fact I explicitly said the opposite: that the quality was uneven. Uneven means some good, some bad.

Also, Viaweb didn't get hosed after being bought by Yahoo. It prospered enormously. I don't bear them any ill will.

I'd like to hear you talk more about what's happened to Yahoo stores. I worked with a Yahoo store (side consulting) for about five years now. Your Yahoo essay seems consistent with what I've noted. The Viaweb/Yahoo Store thing was very good in the late '90s but they haven't changed much since then and it's very dated now. I think they're coasting on the revenue, which I imagine is slipping away to eBay, Amazon, Shopify, etc.

Actually, I have always admired Yahoo Store for the fact that it was/is a solid stream of predictable revenue for Yahoo.

What other Yahoo web properties exhibit this?

I was disappointed you didn't mention Mark Cuban (Yahoo acquired his company, Broadcast.com, for $5.9 billion in Yahoo stock in '99).

Fairly expensive domain redirect.

Side note: I have many memories of creating RTML templates, while coveting Trevor Blackwell's DIY segway (the 2nd version).

Uneven does not necessarily mean "some good, some bad"; it could mean "some bad, some terrible" or "some good, some fantastic" or any combination thereof.

In fact, taken literally, it is devoid of meaning, because any group of human beings can be described as "uneven" for any descriptor one can think of.

But it is not used literally in the article; it is used as a euphemism for "bad", as opposed to the quality of Google engineers (which one guesses is "even"...?)

Now you're playing with words; assume what you mean.

When pg writes "Microsoft is dead" (and the outroar over that from MS apologists sounded a lot like your comment, angry capital letters and all) or "Yahoo is in a death spiral", he's talking about potential for growth, not necessarily short term feasibility as a profitable business. Yahoo is irrelevant to the Valley because by and large their stuff is old hat used by middle aged soccer moms in Nebraska. Lots of companies make lots of money off of middle aged soccer moms in Nebraska, but it's not a growth market, especially if the middle aged soccer moms all start joining Facebook and playing bingo there instead of Yahoo.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1596907

Re: Speaking of talent: Yahoo got best paper at EVERY data-related conference in 2010. No single lab(Google,MS) or university(Stanford etc) has ever done this. Clearly you can achieve this without talent, pg!

engineers/hackers don't usually focus on doing academic research and writing academic papers targeted to top-tier academic conferences. Yahoo Research is certainly a leader in the academic world, but that might not translate directly to the quality of Yahoo developers.

conversely, take hot start-up X of the moment who is known for having awesome 1337 hackers. how many 'best paper awards' have they probably won in top-tier conferences? probably ZERO, since they're not focused on doing academic research.

engineers/hackers don't usually focus on doing academic research and writing academic papers targeted to top-tier academic conferences.

I am in total agreement with this. These days anything targeted towards top-tier conferences typically has a sales-marketing slant wrapped around it.

agreed, well it's because academics have to be good salespeople (i'm not saying that to be demeaning, it's actually a useful skill). professors need to 'sell' their research proposals and visions to funding agencies in order to get multi-million dollar grants. similarly, they need to 'sell' the high-level pitches of their papers to reviewers in ultra-competitive publication venues

I like your first point. Yahoo has done some amazing things and yet somehow all I ever hear about is how they're losing. The example I usually give is the Fantasy Sports team--that they stole the top spot from ESPN is amazing.

I do remember being in the snack room at Brickhouse and seeing two posters along the lines of "watch your competitors." One was Google and the other was Microsoft. I thought those posters were misguided because nothing that I admired about Yahoo included anything that Microsoft and Google did well.

Just a correction to your point #2: Yahoo won the best paper awards in <b>2009</b> at SIGMOD, CIKM, SIGIR, KDD, WSDM, etc. which are indeed the best data conferences. http://labs.yahoo.com/news/311

"Which is the only company to _promote_ hacking culture to students? Yahoo."

http://code.google.com/soc/

[fixed]

Yahoo is still #1 (or #2) in terms of total properties on the web. How is this a death spiral?

How is this a metric for success?

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