Let's ignore the hurt feelings that our employees will have about making a 17 year-old a millionaire.
The price tag for this company aside, am I the only one that detects a hint of jealousy in some of the comments that seem to imply "but he's too young to be a millionaire!"?
Kid: Go for it dude, and good luck.
Yahoo: WTF?? Why not just build your own version of this?
C'mon, this can't be the first time you've noticed that "innovation" has been overused to the point of meaninglessness in tech. "Disruption" doubly so. Don't harp on this kid, he is no less innovative than 95+% of "innovation" I've heard about in the last year.
It would be interesting to read any sort of explanation, not that we'll get one.
But this acquisition is eerily reminiscent of about.me's and is getting a similar level of scorn from us.
Big, dead, web 1.0 company purchases virtually worthless startup for no apparent reason. Site is like almost any HN weekend project that pops up here on Mondays. Confused!
You do realize, Yahoo remains one of the most-visited sites on the Internet? It drives an enormous amount of traffic.
By our standards, Yahoo may not be an exciting or innovative company. But it's in no way dead.
That having been said, it is a bit rich for Vibhu Norby to be concerned about the hurt feelings of employees by making a 17 year old a millionaire. That is an incredibly, incredibly, incredibly, narrow area of the social consequences of wealth to focus on. I have a hard time taking such a myopic point at face value.
You make a valid point about Yahoo being able to produce similar results in house but the software alone doesn't get you a client base, publicity (certainly not the same level of publicity the Summify purchase has received) and the 3 guys they have hired.
So what if he's only 17? If he has good ideas about how to take Yahoo's mobile news presence forward then the problem should disappear. Of course if he's a poor developer then other employees have the right to be frustrated but it should only be based on his competency and not what he is worth.
I've no special insight at Yahoo (had a couple friends work there) but for any sufficiently large company with employees as talented as Yahoo (YUI, YQL, etc) this has surely happened. So... to have your idea/prototype/demo shot down, then later $30m spent on essentially what you'd offered the company for free... that's gotta be frustrating.
Again, pure speculation that this had happened, but I'd be surprised if no one internal to Yahoo had floated/demos something like this before. They certainly could have bought some of the hype (stephen fry, etc) during a rebrand. But... instead, they buy from outside vs using and promoting internally.
Once more - just speculation, but that's were I would suspect frustration would come from.
Bingo.
in fairness the culture there prob prevented people from even feeling this innovative and self motivated.
I've worked in a couple of large orgs where i've told management about great little cheap ideas that just get ummed and ahhed and then forgotten (despite in 2 instances using my own free time to make a prototype).
There used to be an incredible mix of talent at yahoo, and they squandered a lot of that.
What's also interesting is that no one (yet? - maybe I missed it?) seemed to mention the Yahoo 'kiss of death' - how many acquisitions have they done that end up never seeing the light of day, or get shut down? Brickhouse seemed like it might be successful, but culturally that didn't seem to work out too well over time.
That makes it very easy to make calls that in retrospect might seem extremely stupid. Even more so, many of the engineers who get shot down for truly bad ideas will still insist they are good.
Getting the balance right for what you spend time on is very hard.
(That said, I did work at Yahoo until 2005, and at least "my little corner" of Yahoo did feel very bureaucratic and not very conducive to innovation even then)
That has led to 2 different internal products and I'm presently working on something to replace a piece of commercial software that they paid almost $1 million for and doesn't work/has serious limitations. However I did it out of band because I found it interesting. I guess it comes down to put up or shut up.
Often when you come up with an idea, then go to try and do it you realise its 100x times harder than you thought
A major viewpoint that separates me from "when I was a kid" was the realization that the continuum of everything (talent, intellect, potential for evil, charisma, etc) exists. One judges the world by the people around oneself, but those are not limits of human capability, those are the friends one keeps. That realization took a long time to sink in.
Good on this guy. Nice play :)
1: "right" in the sense of a situation like this occurring, not in the sense of moral or intellectual superiority