Yahoo will lay off 20% of staff, or 1600 people
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
E.g., I’m originally from Haiti. A really huge percentage of Haitians still use Yahoo for their email (specifically via yahoo.fr) and they even get a lot of their global news via Yahoo. I’ve seen the same thing apply in various African countries.
Now if only i could convince it to go to https://finance.yahoo.com/ instead of https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/ when in the office it'd be great.
Same here! I'm using it from the last 16-17 years almost every weekday and sunday nights. Tried Google finance but I could not get hooked to it.
As I recall I did pretty well in the short term.
Yahoo Finance has much more detailed financials for a whole bunch of asset classes. For ETFs it has detailed performance data. For equities, you can get (and download) data on stuff like dividend history, stock splits.
Just see for yourself. Pick a few assets and compare. It's night and day how much more detailed YF data is. The only real thing that GF has going for it is in Google Sheets you can put =GOOGLEFINANCE("symbol") and get the current price of that asset (you can also give it a second argument for other attributes, but the data on offer is pretty limited compared to YF).
Was it one of those "We NEED to update the UI for $CURRENT_YEAR fashions!," that drops half the features for "simplicity"?
It was terrible I lost a lot of imaginary money. Made me realize I'm not good at picking stocks. Anyway the point is that portfolio no longer exists on Google Finance. I think they rewrote the code behind Google finance at least twice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_visited_websites
Anecdotally, I still use finance.yahoo.com because it's one of the best free sites out there for financial data. I also use fantasy.yahoo.com for some fantasy sports leagues I'm in.
It was a joint venture owned 50% by SoftBank. It went public as a separate company, and in 2018 took back all its ownership from the former Yahoo. In 2021, it merged with Line (also owned by SoftBank,) and bought the Japanese Trademark to Yahoo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search
So for many years, there hasn’t been any compelling reason for me to use Yahoo for search
Like incredibly deeply ingrained in online life on the Japanese.
I got the clothes but not the face
I got the bread but not the butter
I got the window but not the shutter
But I'm big in Japan
https://www.insider.com/japan-cant-get-rid-the-fax-machine-o...
It’ll be nice when we have portable e-mail addresses. Having a phone number that moves with me is really convenient.
When I hear “NetCo lays off 10K” I wonder, does that mean they will have fewer employees than a year ago? Or is this just a blip on an overall trend of hiring?
This graph[0] makes it look like Microsoft, for example, is laying off far fewer people than they recently hired.
I would intuitively expect Yahoo to be the exception, but it would be great to see something like “…representing N% of its yearly hiring average since 2020” in these headlines.
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/273475/number-of-employe...
In 2019 they had 10,500: https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/verizon-media-layoffs-...!
In 2017, when Verizon acquired them, they laid off 2,100 employees. https://www.fastcompany.com/4040668/tim-armstrong-confirms-y...
The CEO at the time indicated this was a 15% cut (https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/oath-ceo-tim-armstrong-d...), so working backwards they had 14,000 people in 2017.
So in short Yahoo has shrunk to half over the last decade, despite mergers with AOL and other acquisitions
You are correct though, they shrunk to half over the last decade but they had already shrunk by about half in 2017.
Basically, most of these tech companies have been hiring at a constant rate for years, and also experiencing constant attrition. Once the economy soured, and then hiring freezes started, attrition rates had crashed, and the employee count wasn't as affected by freeze as desired. The layoffs have been roughly a reset towards the headcount before the freeze for many companies.
While the whole article is paywalled, I'll quote an excerpt from ben Thompson:
> The popular narrative right now about these layoffs is that tech companies dramatically over-hired during the pandemic, but while that seems to have happened with Amazon — and for arguably very good reasons given the way that e-commerce shot up during lockdowns in particular — the reality is that the rest of the tech companies largely increased at the same rate they always had. Sure, the number of employees they added was large, but that was a function of keeping the same hiring rate off of an ever increasing base.
> In short, no one was giving up a job at one of the big five tech companies this year as fear spread about a broad-based slowdown in hiring... These companies, though, adjusted more slowly to the slower rate of attrition, which means they accidentally increased their headcount... the relatively limited size of the layoffs to date actually reflects that: these companies are not returning to their pre-pandemic levels of employees, but rather to where they would be had they kept up roughly the same rates of hiring this year that they have over the last ten
[0] https://stratechery.com/2023/tech-layoffs-big-techs-hiring-r...
> I think having an identifiable rationale for layoff choices makes a layoff less shitty to go through.
I don’t know. When I went through one the identifiable rationale was “move jobs to a cheaper country with weaker labor laws and more corruption,” and I think “oops sorry random” might have felt better.
This seems like a better way to reduce costs though.
If I got laid off “because we thought you’d quit soon anyways” and I hadn’t given notice already then I’d be quite upset.
However, it could be an initial reaction (right or wrong) to chatGPT and copilot and such. The start (or continuation) of the automation of knowledge work. Nobody has a crystal ball, so we'll see where it goes!
I'm thinking the coming two+ decades of AI transformation will make the Web/Internet transition look quaint in terms of societal impact. But I'm just a 52 year old geek that has been following technology for 40+ years ;)
I had no idea lol
I miss being able to find a high quality page and seeing other high quality pages that the author or authors recommended
It is also a bit sad to see the Yahoo buildings, which Google bought in 2019, just sitting empty and unutilized.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/03/verizon-sells-yahoo-and-aol-...
Having this kind of ridiculous thing in 2023 in a website that pretends to adapt to your location is enough for me to write it off as low-quality trash.
It is interesting what signals we take for credibility, yours being temperature units on a website.
I have no problem with websites that are clearly aimed at users from a specific country, which is often the US. That's fine. But things like this really erode my trust in a site, in my mind it creates a suspicion - if you explicitly show me you can provide services in my country and then get the basics about my country wrong, how can I trust your service works properly here?
Not exactly comparable.
Seems like only yesterday!
I still remember my school Computing teacher introducing the internet and saying that AltaVista was by far and away the best search engine (around 2000 to 2001-ish)
Yahoo! bought Overture - the then owners of Altavista - 20 years ago.
(Last I checked)
The website you found is a Google Custom Search, and it doesn't even tell us which company is running the website.
Twitter / Google / Microsoft / Amazon layoffs occur
HN: The feudal lords have decided the serfs are no longer needed. Google shrinking is a travesty and proves they are a dying company! Time for revolution!
Neither of them are wrong approaches to working at FAANG
Things that were once difficult but are now easy (datacenter management).
Things that are not user facing but which Yahoo is actually doing with much lower headcount than their competitors (ad tech).
Things which don't actually have synergies and have headcounts comparable to independent competitors (e.g. CNET is a 500 person company, Yahoo has a news business, Fanduel is a 2000 person fantasy sports company, Yahoo has one of those too)
But my question stands. What the hell is Yahoo doing nowadays? Yahoo Finance and search can't take that many folks to run. Maybe it's Yahoo Weather?
More recent: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/121015/how-yah...
Older, but more clearly laid out: https://fourweekmba.com/how-does-yahoo-make-money/
How many large orgs with hundreds of millions of users have you worked for? Derive from that experience how many people it takes to run their systems...
If your company's revenue expenditure starts growing to around 1% of the GDP of a small city and you're still LOSING money, at what point and how much employee-risk needs to be taken on for you to prove your business model?
Also crazy that any of these employees ever felt secure. headcount in the thousands to tens of thousands and operating in the red? That's chum in the water.
Edit: wasn’t it just yesterday there was a front page HN post about Yahoo getting back into search?
Yahoo Japan is a separate company from Yahoo. It used to operate with licensing for the "Yahoo" brand, until it bought the brand usage outright from Verison a couple years ago.
Therefore, Yahoo's operation has no effect on Yahoo Japan. It is more affected by its parent company Softbank. When Softbank faced losses from its Vision Fund, they reorganized Yahoo into a subsidiary (in lieu of being a sibling company) and therefore consolidated its profitable accounting as well.
I just walked past a Yahoo Japan physical store selling SIM cards and unnecessary plastic objects. Although it looked like no customer has actually wandered in there since the 90s..
My opinion, news is pretty clickbaity but Sports (particularly the season-long fantasy games) and Finance are both still best-in-class. It's borderline amazing how resilient they've been.
Muscle memory from my childhood days when I’d type in yahoo and edit my avatar lol.
Yahoo focused on building a large collection of different sites. I don't think search for Yahoo was ever very good, but they could accumulate reach by capturing different audiences.
There were so many telemarketers pounding my phone that anytime I got disconnected the phone would ring within thirty seconds and that would be my cue to go investigate.
Yahoo Japan for example is a large part of their traffic.
I wish them luck. Or maybe I wish for a division of the pie, so I could more easily get at the pieces that I like. Either way, I hope Yahoo stays around.