Marissa Mayer Pledges to Take Yahoo Back to Its Roots | Hacker News Reader

Marissa Mayer Pledges to Take Yahoo Back to Its Roots

mashable.com

27 pointssaurabhpalan9 comments

> Flickr for Android

What? Since when has this existed? Lovely to learn of this the day after my 2-year Flickr Pro account expired.

Seems like it's been out for over a year. And I never found it before I gave up looking. Too little, too late, I guess. For Mayer's era's sake, I hope that's not the rest of Yahoo's fate.

Over a year ago?

http://mashable.com/2011/09/28/flickr-android-app/

I don't understand your question . . . that blog post is a year and just short of a month old.

No offense to her but does Mayer really know Yahoo's roots?

As long as she listens to the employees that do, that's a step forward.

I guess she did not meant it literally. I think She's going back to building new innovative products ground up. Pretty much roots of any (successful) company.

Yahoo's roots are... a tardily updated directory of neat things on the web.

It had a certain amount of charm, but I don't miss it, particularly. Although they did have a great MUD index.

IIRC (it's been a while), Yahoo's roots are the librarian approach to the problem of organizing the world's information: classification, taxonomy, Dewey-Decimal, directories and subdirectories, whatever.

I prefer Google's approach to the problem (massive silicon replacing wetware). But, being much lazier than the average slacker, I could be wrong.

There were a couple different direction Mayer could have gone with Yahoo. Previous management was clearly considering taking Yahoo down the path of big Media, and monetizing the eyeballs by increasing engagement, whatever that took.

Mayer is hearkening back to the days of yore, when Yahoo was seen as a cool technology startup that the best engineers were excited about working at.

I have no idea which of those paths is the more profitable, or has the greatest chance of returning shareholder value, but I think we all know which one has the best chance of grabbing the imagination, and attracting the best employees.

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