Yahoo Weighs Spinning Out Hadoop Engineering Group for $1 Billion Opportunity | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo Weighs Spinning Out Hadoop Engineering Group for $1 Billion Opportunity

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56 pointsDanielRibeiro16 comments

Yahoo! has quite a few impressive engineering teams that appear to be saddled down by terrible management. Maybe this can be a new business model for them - a high-end tech incubator.

Of course, they'd first have to stop habitually buying companies and letting them rot on the vine.

That's part of my issue with Yahoo. They have so many smart people who do awesome things, but they'd rather spend all day trying to become a media company.

Cloudera is pretty much dominating the commercial Hadoop market now. It has a huge marketing head-start and arguably better engineers, since it was founded by Yahoo's employees who thought they can do better by leaving. They also have more experienced support and training organizations, pretty much by definition (Yahoo's Hadoop group didn't do that).

I'm wondering how Yahoo spinoff is planning to compete.

>I'm wondering how Yahoo spinoff is planning to compete.

Well if I were the Yahoo spinoff, I'd do exactly what Cloudera is doing, then look for ways to improve on it. It's still a new field, a huge potential industry/problem domain that companies of every size and geography will probably have some demand for, either now or in the foreseeable future. There's plenty of room for multiple competitors, and it's still relatively early.

It's been pointed out on HN before that a reliable way to make money is not to do something new and groundbreaking that people may or may not want, but to look at what's already in demand and making money and find ways to do that competitively or better. Nothing wrong with what Yahoo is doing here in that respect, more power to em.

|It's been pointed out on HN before that a reliable way to make money is not to do something new and groundbreaking that people may or may not want, but to look at what's already in demand and making money and find ways to do that competitively or better. Nothing wrong with what Yahoo is doing here in that respect, more power to em.

I think the term is 'fast follower' and they exist in every industry. Remember all those local yogurt shops that popped up when Pinkberry became popular? Or when Red Bull became popular Monster and Rock Star came shortly after. I would also consider Samsung, Hyundai, Huaweii, LG, and a few others fast followers.

Also, I bet that Cloudera already hired many of the best Hadoop engineers in Yahoo. Because the founders knew who they are and could put serious resources into recruiting them.

Maybe having Yahoo as a captive client while they figure the business plan out?

I'm still a bit of the opinion that Yahoo isn't too far away from a yard sale across the board. I think they might be significantly more valuable in pieces.

Original Wall Street Journal article:

Yahoo Mulls Spinoff for Hadoop Software Unit http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870472930457628...

"We've been covering Yahoo's deepening interest in Hadoop over the past year. The latest development came last week when Yahoo joined the Linux Foundation. It was another signal of its focus on Hadoop and its further commitment to the data analytics technology."

What does joining the Linux Foundation have anything to do with deepening commitment in Hadoop? Supporting Linux makes sense if you're running it on thousands of machines, while Hadoop is a platform-independent (Java-based) stack.

Which primarily runs on Linux.

correlation != causality. There's probably a zillion other things that Yahoo! uses that also run on Linux. Maybe that has something to do with their support of Linux?

... and?

I thought Yahoo had always been a FreeBSD shop. Have they moved to Linux servers?

Linux has been the standard for a couple years for new development and there is an active effort to move to Linux for older properties.

What a great idea this would have been 3 years ago.

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