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Comment by diego | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that Yahoo was born as a product that became obsolete quickly. It has no DNA anymore, it's just a collection of various media services. It's not a computer, or a piece of software, or a social network. It was a directory of web links. A library.

It's doubtful that a Steve Jobs could come back to Yahoo and get it back in touch with its roots. IMHO, their best bet is to sell.

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This.

I used Yahoo and understood what it did for me. In 1997.

Then Google came, and my ass was a portal, and Yahoo's homepage (on the rare occasion I looked at it) was crap.

Then there were Yahoo magazines and mass-media advertising -- we're talking 1999/2000 here. The company already didn't make sense to me then.

I remember ~2009 when AOL were being accused of copying Yahoo's homepage, and thinking "gee ... I've never been on either". Both were crap.

For a while Yahoo's Finance pages were decent (Jeremy Zawodny knows his shit), but even that's passe.

At best they're sort of a Computer Associates of Web 1.0. Where mediocre technology goes to die.

The Bartz era was at least an entertaining train wreck to watch.

AFAIK, yahoo finance is still the number one finance site.

I've always seen Yahoo as a "me too" company - the Carl's Jr of the online titans. If they've ever been the best at something they've never stayed there for long. The decline began when they decided search wasn't their core business and portals were the way to go. Who would want to work there? Even Microsoft are more innovative these days.

Having said all that, thanks for buying Viaweb off PG guys. At least some Yahoo cash went to good use...

At least Carl's Jr is good.

> the Carl's Jr of the online titans

I wouldn't call Yahoo by far the best and most delicious of the online titans.

There's an emotional connection that many geeks have to Yahoo: I know I'd still like to like it. If they made something that made us all go "Aaaaw....", we'd recommend the hell out of it, and soon enough it could replace Google News for some people, for example. And from that the next step would not be too long.

Imagine if they had a great news reading and exploring service integrated in a smart way with a reading list/book marking service - like del.icio.us? (ouch...) They have had great technology.

I'm not so sure about this. The roots of a company run deeper than a product. The original goal of Yahoo! was similar in spirit to Google: help people make sense of the massive amount of information available on the web. They've of course gone in a wild array of directions since then, and I'm not sure they had as long a view of the web as Google did, but I'd be surprised if the founders don't have a good number of strong views they've held about how things should work online since the beginning. It remains to be seen if they can tap into the creative energy and focus that led Yahoo! to its early success.

Google, at least until the advent of Buzz and Google Plus, seemed to keep the user experience first and foremost (they're rapidly losing this vision).

Yahoo turned to face the siren song of advertising and eyeball aggregation, damn the user, by the end of the 1990s. Sure, some of their products may have shone (I was well off and away from their target userbase by that time) but as Diego said, the corporate DNA of organizing the Web, was lost.

I agree, the best bet for current shareholders is to sell. But then what? It's still the acquiring companies problem and what are they supposed to do with it? At some point Yahoo will need to create products or make a market for itself.

That's true but given a brand name and an income stream there should be a way of reinventing themselves regardless of any roots.

I think it's really a people problem. Once the wrong people are in charge they keep replicating and it's very difficult to turn it around.

The only way would be for a buyer to come in, fire everyone who has ever made a product decision at Yahoo and replace them with a much smaller group of people who have a track record of creating successful products and who have no previous relation to Yahoo or the media industry.

Whats Yahoo ever been about, though?

Even in the early days their search index was run by a third party (OpenText, then AltaVista, then Inktomi, then Google, now Bing) and most of their major properties like Yahoo Mail and Store were acquisitions like Four11 Rocketmail and Viaweb.

Just seems like Yahoo has been a long series of acquisitions.

Yahoo was about organizing web sites in an easy to use hierarchical structure, not about searching. If you wanted to learn about "python" the programming language, you'd click computers->programming languages->Python and get a nice list of vetted sites about python. If you wanted to learn about python snakes, you'd click animals->reptiles->snakes->pythons and get another list of vetted sites about snakes. And back in the days when the web was small and search sucked, this was a great way to find sites. Yahoo has been floundering ever since the web grew too big for this approach to be practical, and Alta Vista worked out how to make search work.

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