Jim Lanzone to leave Tinder and become CEO at Yahoo
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I still remember how mad my then wife was about the childcare fiasco.
It's worse than stagnant. I don't get why Verizon paid 9B for Yahoo and now is just selling it for 5B. Perhaps there's some bizarre finance logic behind it?
But wouldn't it have been better for Verizon and now Apollo Global to invest in fresh stuff instead of the VERY CLEARLY DEMONSTRATED DOWNWARD SPIRAL of the Yahoo brand? Did Verizon actually intend to revive the brand? It doesn't seem they did. Nor does Apollo Global which, it appears, are just a bunch of bankers.
I left Yahoo in 2011, but back then, profit margins were usually OK but not nearly as good as competitors. Mostly properties were run by small teams but competing ok against much larger dedicated companies. And then there was search; outsourcing it mostly to Bing but keeping a large team and crawling infrastructure to do customizations didn't make sense to me, but it's what happened.
I don't know how much of the small team enabled by corporate stuff + central advertising team still works at Yahoo, if it's still there, maybe there's hope.
They look to be little more than a news aggregator at this point, so it's just eyeballs from the inertia of users' force of habit to use Yahoo?
I suppose this gives a "life span" of, at most, a few years before the lights get turned off at Yahoo.
Michael Spindler presided over the successful PowerPC transition, but unfortunately he also presided over a catastrophic 1995 for Apple, where Apple had to contend with bad Performa x200/x300 models, faulty PowerBook 5300 models with many issues such as chipping and easily-breakable hinges (not to mention the exploding battery at the factory before release), and the release of Windows 95. Gil Amelio ended up taking over in 1996 to try to turn the company around; we all know what happened NeXT.
Just look at some of the large breaches that happened like 5 years ago and where the CISOs of these companies work for now.
Breaches typically help them improve their profile and career in the long run (maybe you get to even speak in front of congrees) - it's very odd.
I think it has todo with people thinking, oh ,this person has seen some bad stuff - so the person must be experienced. Rather than maybe question if the root cause of the bad stuff (like a breach) was actually an incompetent exec.
But really sometimes you're just put in charge of a sinking ship, and sometimes you sink a perfectly fine ship. I suppose it is sometimes difficult to tell the difference.
Being big company CEO is a very very high wall to get over, but once you do it, I think you have a pretty good shot at keeping the CEO job for the rest of your career.
Startup CEO... might help get some funding in your next startup, or find co-founders easier. Not a lot though I expect..
/s
I really just want old Google where I can tailor my search terms and get what I really want, rather than machine learning trying to either overly target or overly "untarget" it, where it seems to try to guess what a completely average searcher would like, and ignore all the more specific terms in my search.
it's like no, I just want to search exactly what I typed, don't ignore half of it to get more general results or try to decide that I actually want something completely different because you know what city I live in
My main question: when they and other social media control the algorithm and can almost predict when we will "win", at what point is this similar enough to a slot machine and the payout ratio should be regulated by an outside organization?
I wonder if it were more direct if it would be more likely to be regulated: people pay Tinder for each chance to swipe, $10 for 10 swipes. Then Tinder controls who appears in the swipes and can control how much someone "wins" (knowing if someone already liked them or the likelihood they would).
Just seems like it would be pretty easy to get better at making sure the house almost always wins.
That being said, when they're the only house in town, you stop really worrying about whether you're truly getting your money's worth, because you know there's not really any alternative.
I think if each app were allowed to compete individually, instead of as part of a pseudomonopoly, you'd see a much better experience for paying users like myself.
That being said, the "super like" I used yesterday to match with a woman who I'm taking out for dinner tonight cost me the equivalent of half a cup of coffee. Worth it? Who's to say.
> That being said, the "super like" I used yesterday to match with a woman who I'm taking out for dinner tonight cost me the equivalent of half a cup of coffee. Worth it? Who's to say.
I guess there's a part of me that wishes this were pure serendipity or good strategy on your part, and another part that feels suspicious that Tinder could just manipulate the process somehow by front-loading your match with people she'd really not find attractive or even would anger her, then land you right after. Maybe I give them too much manipulation credit and yet without any insight into how their algorithms work, I guess we just take their word for it or leave?
Also, just came up with a slogan that could maybe change how these orgs work (perhaps less so for Tinder but for more social media platforms): "No creation without representation."
*edit: fixed typos
On Tinder, there are no picked winners. Even attractive people compete against each other.
Do you think Tinder is blind to which people are likely to match with each other?
Fair in that maybe it's too complex/not straightforward enough to regulate as other gambling is and maybe similar to video game pay-to-win dynamics, however I still think there is the ability to pull certain levers to control people's sensations of "winning" even if it requires matching two sides.
Again, just maybe it's me feeling more and more annoyed at how little control these companies give us to sort/filter our feeds and therefore how much they really can manipulate our experience (for better or worse), with our main semblance of control being leaving the platform.