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The Glory That Was Yahoo

fastcompany.com

226 pointsohjeez144 comments

IT's amazing that something so simple as a not having a clear vision/mission could take down a successful company but that's the essentially what happened at Yahoo! When I worked there in 2004 it was just confused, chasing competitors and ideas, never deciding on what it wanted to be when it grew up. I left a year or so later and from what I saw it never figured itself out.

I always wanted the company to focus on a mission about being "useful" - like the digital WD-40/duck tape of your life. Finance, news, fantasy-sports, email, messenger, groups, My Yahoo!, Delicious, Flickr... They're all useful. They could have continued to happily and profitably offer all of these services - and expanded to dozens more - under the mantra of being useful to our every day lives, but Yahoo! was never content with that. They wanted to be eBay, or Google, or Facebook, or YouTube or whoever else was a big player at the time, instead of focusing on the customer loyalty they had already generated.

Having that clear core vision/mission seems like a small thing, but not having one crippled Yahoo! and caused infighting, turnover and confusion that eventually killed it. (Oh, and also Mayer was an idiot.)

It's kind of amazing it took so long for it to kill them.

Google seems to be falling into a similar pattern with it's many different attempts at chat apps

Google's income stream from advertising is not as vulnerable as Yahoo's home page for the internet model as far as I know.

Not AS vulnerable but in the near future when you search thru voice commands and hear results back, all those google ads that your eyes scan can be thrown out of window.

Here is relevant read: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/27/alphabet-investors-voice-sea...

For how many of your daily searches would you prefer to use voice? Voice has much higher latency and lower bandwidth than text/vision.

Interesting. To Google's credit, they jumped on mobile early when they realized where traffic was trending.

And they admitted that they make less on mobile because they have to pay companies like Apple to be the default search engine.....

Then those voice commands start returning "affiliate" responses.

Amazon's got this figured out. Some significant portion of voice commands are:

-User sees they've run out of widgets

-User says "Alexa, order some widgets"

Having the ability to drive that traffic to one store or another is a big advantage that stores will pay for.

They still haven't demonstrated that they can make significant money on anything other than advertising. They do a lot of stuff but nothing really turns into a profitable business. Compare that to Microsoft who have shown over decades many times an ability to get into new lines of business profitably.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204418...

Take a look at Google's earnings. in 2017 Google made $95 billion from ads, and $14.2 billion from "other revenue". Which is classified as:

Other Revenue: Apps, in-app purchases, and digital content in the Google Play store; Google Cloud offerings; and Hardware.

So Google is making money from other places, just not near as much as Ads yet.

Around 13% of total revenue then, growing year on year, that's nice. I would like to know what percentage of net profit is contributed by that fraction.

It's very possible that they produce a lot of revenue but no profit like Uber. On the other hand I would assume Google Cloud is making money since Azura and AWS are profitable for MS and Amazon.

Google has said that it's (at least) a billion per quarter. [0]

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/01/google-cloud-revenue-passes-...

Revenue, sure, but what about profit?

The other category is producing an operating loss.

Just as a stray example, for 3Q17 Alphabet generated $7.8 billion in operating income.

Google, the subsidiary, generated $8.7 billion in operating income for that quarter.

With continued solid growth of Google's cloud business, and the pull back on burning red ink on Google Fiber, maybe they'll push that other category to break-even soon. Regardless, Google is generating all of their profit. Google is a cash production marvel, nearly on par with the iPhone at this point. They should be able to hit around $40 billion in operating income in that subsidiary this year.

You are confusing Alphabet other with Google other. Google other is material and their fastest growing segment.

That's revenue not profit.

What they are doing is exactly the opposite of what grandparent claimed Yahoo did.

They just create things that are useful.

Search, GMail, Maps, Chrome, Android, Youtube, Analytics and many other products and services.

If they can milk them from advertising, they will. But they don't necessarily care if it doesn't make money directly.

They own so many crucial parts of the internet that they cannot become irrelevant like Yahoo did.

Compare that to similar companies.

Facebook has only Facebook.com, Whatsapp and Instagram (which is basically just Facebook)

Amazon their store and AWS. Their other attempts (phone, tablets, Alexa, etc) have never took off.

Microsoft is in a powerful position as they have Windows, Office, Azure, XBox and Bing although they have not managed to gain share in new markets for quite some time.

I think Google is by far the most relevant company on the internet.

They gain market and the cash will flow later. This is in their DNA. This is how exactly it got started for them.

Their search was popular but was not making money for years. All they did was to focus on making it better, thinking that they'll find a way to make money later. And they did.

Exactly. Focus on providing value to your customer and all will be good with financials. Google grwth has actually accelerated as their numbers get bigger.

Fastest growing aspect of Google is their non ad businesses.

Not only chat apps.

Android, Flutter, ChromeOS, PWA, Fuchsia...

Feel like using the NDK on Android?

Legacy gradle plugin, Gradle stable plugin with cmake, ndk-build or eventually the new C/C++ support being developed by Gradle.

Ah, and then there is Blaze as well.

When promotion/compensation is tight to new things (products, internal tools, etc)...

Is there any benefit to their career to undertake maintenance?

"is tied to"

thank you :)

What do you mean "useful"? Every viable product is useful for something. That doesn't narrow it down.

What it meant to me was that Yahoo couldn't help itself from taking every successful product or acquisition and screwing it up, deprecating it or otherwise wholly missing why its users valued it.

These have been listed in greater detail elsewhere, but Y! Games is one of the most glaring examples where they had a massive, loyal audience and just destroyed the community bit by bit.

Flickr is the other commonly sited example where Yahoo just didn't seem to understand why the users valued it so much. Every year they'd nerf some core aspect of the product trying to turn it into something less useful but more "trendy".

Finally, for me, the "my.yahoo.com" customizable landing page / rss feed had enormous utility and huge potential but was just left to rot.

Used to use my.y.com daily as my home page until they fixed it to be unusable and then abandoned it.

> but Y! Games is one of the most glaring examples where they had a massive, loyal audience and just destroyed the community bit by bit.

I'm sorry, but at least we tried when I was there, and if it hadn't been one of Filo's babies, it would have been killed long before we got to take a stab at it.

I think useful in this case is pretty clear with the WD-40/duct tape example; hardly the best-in-class solution, but when you just need a simple, short-term solution, then Yahoo! should be the place to go.

In the same fashion that excel is the default go-to tool for any kind of basic data management (and now to a certain degree superceded by google spreadsheets), Yahoo! would have been the default place to go basic image hosting, basic blogging, basic chatting, basic news; A good enough solution to meet the 80% of common problems

Ah, then "low end" is the more appropriate descriptor.

Well, low end but expansive in its utility. Useful like a swiss army knife

> (Oh, and also Mayer was an idiot.)

Elaborate?

No the OP. Mayer was intelligent but probably didn't so the smartest things for Yahoo.

More info here: "Why Marissa Mayer is the ‘least likable’ CEO in tech" https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/31/why-yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-...

They could have survived without a "vision"; lots of boring utility companies do. But in order to do so they would have had to be detail- and customer-focused. This would have been boring, unglamourous and offered at most a few percent growth. They might have had to charge users, heresy.

I'm always skeptical about this argument because it can be seen either way, if the old world companies stuck to their vision/mission they might just be disrupted by new/alternate business models/technology and if they try to experiment (Ex: Google) it can be seen as not having a clear vision. There are very few companies that can sustain through 50 yr cycles but even having a clear vision may not help a company succeed if someone else renders their business useless.

Mission/Vision should evolve and sometimes it might be considered luck and sometimes foresight.

Ex: Nokia: Pulp Mill -> Rubber/Tires -> Cables/Electronics -> Phones

Similarly, Nintendo is almost 150 years old. They spend most of their history as manufacturer of playing cards.

I think it would be cool if, on their 150th anniversary, they make a Mario Hanafuda deck.

I think its the case that changing goals is fine, as long as the current plan of action is clear

but having many, competing, and underspecified goals, is the problem of unclear vision; You're doing a bunch of work, but its not clear where you're trying to go. Driving aimlessly, versus driving to texas and halfway through changing your mind to drive to chicago, are two very different acts.

> Mayer was an idiot.

Don’t have much to say about her. It could have been anyone else in the management class looting a company for eight or nine figures and leaving it for dead. I’d do it for seven, if anyone needs a punching bag.

Finance, news, fantasy-sports, email, messenger, groups, My Yahoo!, Delicious, Flickr... They're all useful.

I agree these are useful, but they weren't very good businesses. Take email. Email is useful. Most of us use it every day, arguably for more important communications than facebook. Still, facebook is a massive business and email is barely a business at all, generally.

Yahoo was blinkered by chances at big wins for the same reason VCs and nearly anyone in that game is, they're very, very big relative to the medium sized ones.

core vision... they kind of lost that game. The first vision was the directory, which is really just search with a different back-end. This turned out to be an excellent business, but they didn't realize what they had.^ Google ate the whole pie.

The 2nd vision was content, to be a sort of online publication/media business. They half abandoned the first vision for this one. Your examples mostly fit here. This turned out to be (mostly) a terrible business type, and the wide, generalist variant that type which yahoo was going for turned out to be even worse.

I don't really know what they could have done from the early 2000s onwards. Your core vision needs to be, the core of what you do. There wasn't a core anymore.

^even though they basically invented adwords, the business model for that business.

They didn’t need everything to be good business if they could build an ecosystem, as others have demonstrated. Google has done this well.

> ...but Yahoo! was never content with that. They wanted to be eBay, or Google, or Facebook, or YouTube or whoever else was a big player at the time, instead of focusing on the customer loyalty they had already generated.

This is far from unique about Yahoo! too. So many services I loved using have gone under because they were VC funded and, though successful, useful, etc., weren't able to "eat the world" and so were shuttered.

I keep waiting for Twitter to go under that way. I think the Trump White House may have bought them some time, but they're just too damn top heavy to stay afloat.

Mission/vision is often the largest thing rather than a small thing with regards to long-term success. Waging a war without an overall mission and vision for achieving it results in, at best, a collection of battles that can only accidentally be strategic (and usually judged as such retrospectively).

Of course operating under overly vague generalities while believing they are mission/vision statements is nearly as bad as operating with none.

> Oh, and also Mayer was an idiot.

that's not appropriate..

> “We didn’t want to call it a portal, because a portal is a door to somewhere else, and we wanted people to stay there,” says Shannon Brayton, a senior manager in Yahoo’s corporate communications department from 1998 to 2001.

Of course the company that eventually killed them, Google, found its earliest success by explicitly rejecting this ethos. Google was a search engine, they didn't care if it sent you away; they wanted it to send you away, because that meant it was working. It meant you had found what you were looking for. A search engine's entire job is to send you away.

But then came AdWords and the IPO, both of which applied pressure on Google to become something else, something other than a search engine. Something that herded eyeballs together, rather than pushing them out. Something that eventually became what Google ironically is today: a better Yahoo than Yahoo ever was.

> Google was a search engine, they didn't care if it sent you away; they wanted it to send you away

... only seems obvious in hindsight, though. I worked for a string of internet companies in the late 90's back when people were still trying to figure out what an internet company was supposed to be. The biggest task that they consistently put on me, the tech guy who actually understood what "internet" meant, was making sure that users didn't use too much of the company's internet, because internet was expensive. When I first heard of MySpace, I was floored - they're just letting people upload stuff to their servers? Like... whatever they want? As often as they want? They don't charge each individual user by the individual byte? This was heresy! (And then I checked to see if they were hiring...)

So how was MySpace able to do that back then? Did they just have a lot of funding that they were able to use to give away all that free space?

And with AMP, Google as well, now, wants you to stay.

I'm surprised that AOL isn't really discussed in this article. I always assumed Yahoo's ethos, as the one-stop shop on the internet ("We didn’t want to call it a portal, because a portal is a door to somewhere else, and we wanted people to stay there") came straight out of AOL's playbook. What I know for sure is that I, and a lot of other people, immediately felt comfortable with Yahoo when we first started using the internet because we were so used to AOL's vision of how you connect "online".

I think the connection run strong - I'd go as far as saying that Yahoo and AOL failed for the same reason. To survive at their inflated valuations they had to be everything to everyone, which stretched their vision thin. Meanwhile, it was always impossible to do everything, so smaller, more agile players came in and etched away at their business models.

> To survive at their inflated valuations they had to be everything to everyone, which stretched their vision thin

Your comment is spot on.

It also handcuffed them to their established business model(s) and "properties", because they couldn't afford to take a revenue hit or self-cannibalize to transition to the next S-curve eating the world. Given that, demise is inevitable.

The Google search comparisons in the article are strange. Google did not win the search engine war because it had integrated ads, I think it won because the search results were so much better. There might be some indirect connection - less revenue because of a different advertising model, leading to less investment - but I rather think this was just about the technology not being there. Which is maybe not that surprising when coming from curated links and suddenly fighting, well, Google.

IIRC, Google was one of the first search engines to AND your search terms by default, returning relevant pages from long tail sites. Other search engines at the time would OR your search terms, returning irrelevant pages from popular sites. I think this simple difference in defaults had almost as big an impact as Google's PageRank/BackRub algorithm.

To get an idea of where the search experience was when google came to market - they were the first ones to have the text cursor located in the search box. You didn't have to click the box before you started typing, your cursor was automatically placed in the correct place.

And most other search engines put ads on the main search page. Google just gave you a box. This was a big deal when you're on those old, slow connections. It was also less obtrusive and more classy.

Every search engine of Yahoo's era supported ANDing terms. It didn't help. The result you wanted was still swimming beneath 7 pages of trash. Commonly it wasn't even in the results because the AND was too restrictive.

Backrub is what made Google so much better. Google also really focused on search and made numerous improvements, but the linchpin was backrub.

It was also ludicrously fast at returning results compared to everyone else at the time. I was shocked at the time that a dynamically generated page could return so quickly.

I still to this day miss Altavista's advanced operators though

Yes google was so much better than all those other sites it was like night and day.

I was in high school at the time in the 90's. Where I lived the internet wasn't very widespread only place I could access it was via dial up in our school library I remember trying to do school projects having to go through the search engine dance you'd start by searching yahoo, then infoseek, then lycos, then altavista one by one slogging through pages of useless results trying to find what you were looking for.

I was in 8th or 9th grade we were given an assignment to write a report about the "G8 forum" none of the search engines I used at the time were capable of returning meaningful results for all the possible combinations of "G8", "G+8", "G and 8", "Group of 8", "G AND 8 AND Summit OR Forum" I could think of. I'd just get pages and pages of nonsense compounded by the fact my school's dial up was so slow - a 33 kb modem I think it was an exercise in frustration.

I complained to my parents about it over dinner and my Dad said 'oh you should try google.com' First time I'd ever heard about google, the next day at school I tried a google search and got meaningful results on the very first page. I don't think I ever used Yahoo or any of those other sites again after that.

That was pretty much my experience as well, though I was in college. Someone pointed me at Google when I was struggling to find something and it was just clearly so much better that I basically just never used Yahoo again.

Google built a better mousetrap.

This is a nice article, but the truth is that Yahoo is to Google as Myspace is to Facebook.

> The Google search comparisons in the article are strange. Google did not win the search engine war because it had integrated ads

Extremely strange. Google won because search was better. Users flocked there because it actually worked. The fact that it had integrated ads was incidental. Integrated ads helped with funding obviously, but users don't care about that. (To the extent that they do, they actively don't want it.)

This is my recollection as well. Google was amazing because the results were so astonishingly better than anything else before it.

As for ads, I don't recall Google even having ads at all to begin with. And when they did start including advertising, everyone was already getting annoyed with web ads, and Google had somehow found a way to do ads "right."

(Unrelated: I would just like to say that the subheading "Portal Combat" is worth the salary of whoever wrote it.)

From Paul Graham, inside view: http://paulgraham.com/yahoo.html "What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the company. They were already very visible when I got there in 1998. Yahoo had two problems Google didn't: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company."

>> easy money

Some time around 1995-6, yahoo reported earnings $0.05/share above expectations after the markets closed, and the stock shot up more than $200.00 in after-hours trading. Can any company survive that?

What glory? All these points were acquisitions. Everything this article celebrates were destroyed by Yahoo. The only thing they ever did well was build a portal.

A lot of times they'd buy up companies just for the developers and then kill the product, like with Astrid Tasks (at least Microsoft didn't kill Wunderlist after acquiring it).

I'm curious the number of devs that stayed at Yahoo past a year from these buyouts versus those who were like 'fuck this' and started looking for new work.

The free email account at Yahoo was a nice one too. The web client was really nicely done.

I worked for AOL, who Verizon recently merged with Yahoo . It was inevitable they destroyed the startups . Yahoo processes made us look lean in comparison, and we were another old web 1.0 company . The first thing they make you do is port to their tech stack and so much time is spent on that process and approvals from central teams that it's a wonder anything gets done . They've got their own package manager, own internal ec2 clone, own build system, own Linux distro, own deploy system, and if any of those things were good it might make sense, but they're mid-2000s tech in quality .

Flickr disappeared for a crucial year post merger, and apparently they were porting to Yahoo's internal account system: https://gizmodo.com/5910223/how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost... . At least that produced some user facing unification compared to some of the tasks we had . The attitude has not improved since .

> , own internal ec2 clone,

Are you talking about openstack/openhouse, or something else?

Honestly, it's no different anywhere. BigCorp, no matter the quality, will acquire in the hopes of getting the 'special sauce' that comes with the startup but then proceeds to either force a rewrite, or poach all the people off, kill the product, or some other means of demotivating all people involved.

> but they're mid-2000s tech in quality .

This was the most disappointing part of being acquired. It was quite a wake-up call to realize that the culture inside Yahoo actually believed that their tech stack was good and competitive and that they were as innovative as Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Amazon.

Nope. Yahoo obviously had a bunch of really clever people working there up until the year 2000, and they had to build a lot of things that didn't exist back then, because they were the first internet behemoth. But then all of those really clever people quit, and the company was left trying to steward the existing systems, while not having enough brainpower to create successor systems. So they were stuck, and a myopic "we're hot shit!" culture developed.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world went on, and "Yahoo scale" just aren't very impressive numbers anymore, and their 2000's tech stacks are just horribly overly complex solutions.

I worked at aol and if yahoo’s stuff was worse I can’t imagine how bad it was.

Are you in dialup internet services group? I heard AOL no longer sending dialer installer floppies.

> They've got their own package manager, own internal ec2 clone, own build system, own Linux distro, own deploy system

This exactly describes the current cadre of internet giants as well, and it does seem nuts, but it's important to realize why this happens. For one thing, these systems were often developed and made to run at scale well before their better known brethren appeared. Sometimes those better known brethren eventually surpass the internal tools. Sometimes they never do.

> The first thing they make you do is port to their tech stack

There's no simple answer to whether this is a good idea. Switching costs are a real thing. Even if what you're switching to is better, that superiority has to outweigh the cost of the transition itself. There's a cost to the parent company switching, and there's a cost to the acquiree switching. There's also a cost of running a bazillion different software stacks on ten kinds of hardware and operating systems, as I know AOL did in those days. Maybe that's part of the reason they stopped being a viable standalone company. The most successful post-acquisition tech merges I've seen have been very deliberate about the costs and benefits of changing each part, not adopting blanket "always" or "never" rules.

The title is a parody of "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Helen

I remember back in 1995 getting on Yahoo one day and going through every single category and clicking every website link in the entire directory (I was in college and bored). I like to tell my kids that at one point it was possible to visit every singe website on the WWW ;-)

There was a brief period of time where visiting a link felt like a new adventure. We take the simplicity of a "link" for granted today, probably because most links are just clickbait now.

Eventually links turned into time-consuming traps of "under construction" animations and icons and popup advertising hell. But even then, the Internet truly felt like the wild west.

I miss the diversity in web design back in the day. From blinking, colorful and seizure-inducing to very dark pages with little torch gifs. Weirdly enough every website now looks the same (ok maybe we have 3 archetypes of web design) even though the number of sites has grown exponentially for decades.

I remember web rings. There were some nice rabbit holes to get lost.

I remember when I was first told that there was such a thing as a search engine, when they were new. And I thought, "how could any one, free site index every site on the WWW?"

Every 1995 site... a tally of which was hardly statistical noise compared to today's numbers.

> Yahoo Briefcase, for instance, did cloud storage long before the likes of Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive.

Ha. Yahoo! had an internal idea portal and a review team. Expanding Y! Briefcase storage was the first thing I submitted to that portal upon joining the company in 2005 (I am sure I wasn't the first to think of it, but there was no way to see previously submitted stuff).

The response from the ideas counsel was that Briefcase at the time was primarily used to illegally share music/video, and expanding personal storage would only exacerbate bad behavior. It would be in company's interest to sunset the service, not expand it.

Has there ever been a time where a lawyer helped promote a new product idea? Seems like they are in the business of saying (kinda like accountants). This is a useful protective function, but can definitely cause stasis. Not sure how to balance it.

Oops, I meant to type "council". It was a collective body from what I gathered.

Two of the four founders of Intellectual Ventures were attorneys[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures

That was probably the correct decision in 2005. Most file-sharing sites have gone out of business. The successful ones have distinguishing features. Box is still a B2B company, Drive benefits from synergy with the entire G Suite, and Dropbox's primary feature is sync.

GeoCities in the early 2000's is where I first created and built something with a computer and the Internet and the experience started the journey towards becoming a software developer. I still remember using a hit counter to track how many people visited my cartoon fan-site (I was 10, 11 years old) and getting excited over 20 visitors.

Wow. I didn't know about Yahoo! Music. That was definitely a service ahead of its time. I can see why it failed in the early 2000s (less trust in internet transactions, slower bandwidth) but it's basically the same service that Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, etc, offer nowadays.

IMO, Yahoo music failed because you couldn't take it with you anywhere and because the music industry wasn't ready to part with their $10+ per album mindset.

Did I love that service...

You could for a fee - you could transfer songs to an MP3 player with the appropriate DRM.

Just like last.fm :(

Early 2000's was the heyday of illegal music services though. Audiogalaxy being the best but things like Napster and Limewire and emule were just too tempting for any legal alternative to swoop in yet.

IIRC, that was an acquisition. I interviewed there, they were a block away from Real Network in Seattle, and mostly consisted of alumni from there. In 2004, Real Network was A Big Deal.

Yahoo was great for like the 2 years between when the web started becoming useful and when google figured out search.

They never figured out what they were after the hand edited index of the internet stopped being its reason to exist.

I still think the ideal search experience was the era when Yahoo! would search the Yahoo! Directory by default, and allowed you to switch over to "Web" results that were actually Google search results. It was a cool way to have a default search for "official" or more curated content in Directory (reminds me a little of DuckDuckGo marking a result as "Official Site"), and the option to search web content at large too for more specific or obscure stuff. RIP Yahoo! Directory.

Only thing I ever found useful(and still do) is Yahoo Finance.

Guessing you’re young / missed the beginning of the net, because that’s when yahoo was king.

Even back in the day, I preferred Altavista. I have never perceived yahoo or any of their products as good, or used any regularly, other than a few that were acquired like Flickr.

yahoo was before Altavista. When they started a table of contents of the web it was great - back when the web was small enough that you could make a table of contents (at the time gopher was bigger than the web and growing faster, and gopher was mostly accessed via the table of contents). When Altavista came yahoo's index was better because instead of having to figure out the right search terms you could navigate a logical table of contents quickly. Then the web exploded (gopher was already all but dead) and it wasn't possible for yahoo to keep up, at which point search became the only hope.

If Altavista hadn't quit updating their index for several months, they could have killed google just by keeping their index up to date and continuously refining their search algorithm. Of course this last is speculation but it is reasonable, google wasn't that much better.

Well, Yahoo was founded in March 1995 and Altavista was opened in December 1995, which I think is generally the same time period.

My perception as a technical user at the time is different than yours -- Altavista was much more influential to me than the curated table of contents that Yahoo had.

When I first saw Google I'd been using AltaVista almost exclusively because it allowed phrase searching and keyword exclusion. Google seemed primitive by comparison.

However, it was light and fast at a time when most of my access was via 64k lines or dial-up. AltaVista had become increasingly cluttered with GIF advertising and 'portal' nonsense.

AltaVista became slow and cumbersome, while Google was fast and clean. For me, that was AltaVista's downfall.

Yes, this. While I appreciated Google's relevancy for search it didn't blow me away that much -- the real special sauce that early-Google had was the extremely lightweight search page. At a time when Altavista, lycos, Yahoo, etc. were just piling on goop after goop onto their landing pages, Google did a really smart thing and disrupted the whole space with its very minimal style. Not even sure how deliberate that was, but it was a huge advantage.

I think it was deliberate, because when they did include advertising in search results, they innovated with text-only ads (and on an unobtrusive part of the page).

I recall that I grew to appreciate these ads - they were often relevant to what I was doing at that point in time. Much more civilised than the garish GIFs that were the norm at that time.

> yahoo was before Altavista

You're talking about a very small window there, even if you focus on more than launch date. I remember Yahoo being the go to around 1995, and Altavista being the source for power results starting around 1997-99 or so. That's an iPhone 6s to iPhone 8 window of time.

I agree with this (and other comments to the same effect). There was only a short time where yahoo was better than Altavista.

I'm probably older than you, and I've never used Yahoo search or any of their other inferior products.

After this week's redesign of Google Finance, I do too.

There was Yahoo Pipes... and, best of all, Yahoo! Weekly Picks (does anyone remember that?).

Yahoo pipes was ok when it worked, and could have been brilliant. I remember setting up a pipes page to filter the digg front page around the time when the last harry potter book was being released. It worked well enough to keep me from getting spoiled, but I remember the rest of the experience was kind of miserable.

Yahoo could've owned the entire dating scene. Yahoo Personals was HUGE long before Match / OKC / Tinder / etc.

Great quote from Paul Graham on Yahoo's demise: Hacker culture often seems kind of irresponsible. That's why people proposing to destroy it [replacing it with "suit" culture] use phrases like "adult supervision." That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example.

Couple of comments about Yahoo being dead or killed off... Yahoo is still around doing the exact same things it's been doing.

It hasn't even changed it's name. Technically it's bigger now that it's merged with AOL.

Yahoo died because it forgot it was a technology company and stopped innovating. I've also heard that it developed an internal culture dominated by non-technical sales types who didn't understand how to manage their acquisitions or run a technology business and who de-valued those parts of the business. Didn't take long for them to get left in the dust by more innovative rivals.

Yahoo could not decide whether it was a technology company or media company...

The same could be said for most current tech titans. Some are just at different points along their lifecycle than others.

Well, really, Google deliberately kept out of content provision for years in a way that Yahoo didn't. Google was only interested in being the gateway or the platform, not the publisher. That seems to have worked for them.

I could say the same about Facebook today.

Yahoo was poorly managed for its entire existence. They tried to do everything and ended up doing nothing well. The products that they were best known for search, email, finance, sports all stagnated for years while their attention shifted towards the newest shiniest thing.

They never seemed to ask the question, "Why do people use Yahoo in the first place?".

Once I went to Stanford to attend Donald Knuth's Annual Christmas Lecture. During the talk he wanted to show some search query on google. What he did next was interesting. He typed yahoo.com in a browser's address bar and then searched for google on yahoo's search to reach to google!!

Why and why it's interesting?

Because even the people who invented modern computing and have a complete understanding of how the internet works, are still vulnerable to the bad habits that dictate our ability to use the internet.

I think what he is also saying is that Yahoo had a built in buffer, that they had to work really hard to fuck up. Because even Genius's turned to Yahoo to Google things for a long time.

Also anytime a genius can't do a basic task it is "interesting". Viral sites like Buzzfeed love spreading stories about how Steven Hawking couldn't figure out how to use his Comcast remote control.

> still vulnerable to the bad habits

Doesn't it seem more likely it was a joke?

It totally could have been. But if I'm focused on giving a presentation, I've been known to subconsciously do some dumb things when on my computer, so it could have been him just not devoting any attention to what he was doing.

I totally agree Knuth is a genius, but he does not look like an early adopter at all. He does not use email and I would not be surprised if he does not have a mobile phone (not even a non-smart one).

I think that if I had seen him typing google.com in the yahoo search bar, I'd have just thought: of course.

That's an interesting take. I never thought that he didn't use email because he was behind the times. I thought he used email for a period and then gave it up in 1995 (or something ridiculously early) like that because he was so ahead of the curve he could see where it was going and didn't want to waste his time.

Actually, you are right. This is the exact quote:

> I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.

My point was that he does not really care. I'm sure he still follows very closely some advancements, but he is not the kind of people I expect to be very informed about the new IDE, Javascript framework or web standard, for example. He is happy programming in a chalkboard.

That had to have been a joke - that's a common old person meme in IT.

Definitely not a joke. Well, perhaps that specific instance is, but at Yahoo! many of the most common search terms were domains; one argument had internally for not putting cursor focus in the search bar was precisely because people just used it as if it were the address bar, and the appetite to support that use case was low. (Source: ex-Yahoo! staff, albeit not in search and with a fallible memory).

it's a meme but i've also seen it happen.

When I worked at Encyclopedia Britannica in the late 90s the two top queries on our portal (at the time it was ebig.com which then became eblast.com and then britannica.com) were "yahoo.com" and "sex". I brought this up at a executive level meeting after someone spent several minutes talking about how people came to our site to do serious research on the Internet. It made for a nice awkward silence.

While Yahoo! is mostly a memory in the U.S., it lives on (or at least its brand does) very strongly in Japan. You see Yahoo! Japan logos everywhere in big cities.

Yahoo! Auctions is just about the only game there, sending fleaBay to the woodshed.

Also in the Philippines! I can't begin to tell you how many Filipinos I know who, to this very day, have @yahoo.com email accounts and still use Yahoo! Messenger.

I think my biggest takeaway from this article is how few names I recognise in it, apart from all the CEOs, despite working for Yahoo! from 1999 to 2011. Mind you, in Europe I rarely felt particularly connected to what was going in in Sunnyvale. Still proud to have worked on the official FIFA world cup website, among other things.

The Google misstep (as it was considered by many) hurt for a while. The high traffic mailing list for unmoderated developer chat eventually begat a "what would Google do?" offshoot because Gmail this, search that, page rank the other were dominating too many threads.

It's almost exactly 10 years since Yahoo rejected Microsoft's acquisition offer. Even at the time it was pretty clear they should have accepted it, but it seems like Yang was too proud.

Microsoft offered $45 Billion(!) for Yahoo.

https://www.thestreet.com/story/13655197/1/what-would-have-h...

Not to mention it would probably have hastened MS’ demise/reinvention years earlier.

Altaba (Yahoo!'s Alibaba assets) is worth $68 Billion[1], so no, they probably did the right thing.

[1]https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AABA/

I mean, we're comparing 2008 money to 2018. If you put $45 billion in the stock market in 2008 when this offer was rejected it'd be worth ~$90 billion now.

If they were given MS stock as part of the deal, that $45 billion would be worth around $130 billion.

So, still probably a bad idea to reject the offer.

Yahoo Labs was innovative and inspiring. They seemed to make stuff that was useful, wasn't killed immediately and had an independent life. I don't think today's tech behemoths can approach where they were. Maybe it was just the frontier back then...

With every re-design, their services get worse. Yahoo Sports used to have easy access to boxscores and game recaps. My Yahoo's RSS content fetching has been broken for a while. Problem is, there are no real alternatives either.

no mention of Yahoo Pipes?

No, but the mainstream impact of that nice site was probably just too low.

Partner was glued to yahoo as a landing page for years. I never understood why, suspect it was the familiarity of it.

The article doesn't even mention the whole Yahoo-Alibaba fiasco.

A huge part of what yahoo were was the dotcom bubble. They're like a personification (firmification?).

People could see the internet was a big deal. People could see that oligopolies would be important. They assumed early movers would own the market. Investors and startups were right about a lot of things, but it was enough to be wrong about one or two things... Yahoo did better than most.

No one knew how long it would take for the internet to "get there," and the implications for early movers. In retrospect, I think this was knowable, but everyone made this mistake.

More importantly, no one knew what businesses would be valuable online.

Servers would become amazon's main moneymaker. They achieved (along with others) the goal of becoming a retailer on a scale not yet seen then, but servers are a better business. Go figure.

Search, holiday rentals & distinct categories of social networking became monopolies, and great businesses. The Encyclopedia became better than anyone imagined, but not a business. Retail margins never improved. Free online video never became a business. Online news is barely a business. Email is not a business. ebay would stay exactly the same. Go figure.

Stress on the news point. News was the centrepiece business of almost any other media sector, print, tv, radio, teletex... online, it's a dud.

All this stuff had to be figured out.

Yahoo started from logical premises. You couldn't find anything online, so they made a directory. There wasn't much online, so they published stuff for people to read. They surveyed the two, saw more potential in the latter. Huge mistake.

It just wasn't obvious at the time. The better the directory/search got, the less time people spent there. People spent time looking at news and stocks and stuff. ...That's where the ad money will be, like TV. It was not ilogical, it was just not true.

Who knew that search advertising would be a $100bn blue chip business and "content advertising" would be mostly penis enlargment and diet tricks? Surely yahoo finance would be a premium ad seller? no? really? search & facebook, the online tabloid?

A lot of stuff still doesn't make sense. Youtube. Why isn't youtube a serious business? People watch 1bn hours of youtube per day! TV ads are a thing. A big deal, in fact. They don't pay anything for content. Google already has a massive ad business. For the life of me... youtube should be as bigger business than facebook.. certainly bigger than netflix.

Incidentally, almost every news site tries to force/trick me into watching videos (not even always ads). ...hints at how bad a business news is, that they want a sliver of what youtube have so desperately.

TLDR: Yahoo had to guess a lot of future, and place bets. It turned out that these bets could be placed 5-10 years later, with much better chances of being right and without missing out on much. Hard gig Yahoo.

good job jerry yang

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