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Comment by camus | Hacker News Reader

I dont understand why Yahoo would need Tumblr , nor i got why they bought Summly the price they paid.

Is it to look relevant ? Yahoo has a ton of services, a ton of engineers and apps that could do better if they were made better. Yahoo still feels like it is 1999. Why not work on yahoo mail and make it relevant ? groups and make it relevant ? what about their ugly homepage ? I mean there is a ton of things to do, instead of buying things like Tumblr.

Marissa is cute and intelligent , but what's her strategy for Yahoo? At that rate , she'll be out in a year.

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What does cute factor have to do with anything in this thread?

“Ballmer is rotund and intelligent, but what’s his strategy for Microsoft?” sounds just as silly.

Seems like the OP's sentence has a sexist undertone to it.

Because CEO is company's main representative and being charismatic/attractive certainly wouldn't hurt company's image. This applies to both male and female CEOs.

And since when calling a person pretty qualifies as sexism? Or is it the lack of "women in IT" threads lately that makes people throw the S-word around irrelevantly?

> Yahoo has a ton of services, a ton of engineers and apps that could do better if they were made better.

Does buying Tumblr take away focus from their other services? I don't think Yahoo engineers working on those projects will be transfered to Tumblr.

> Yahoo still feels like it is 1999. Why not work on yahoo mail and make it relevant ?

Yahoo mail is plenty relevant. It's the 3rd largest email provider with 281 million users. And they updated it last December.

> what about their ugly homepage ?

They updated it. Also ugly != functional.

> I mean there is a ton of things to do, instead of buying things like Tumblr.

Once again, you are assuming the two are exclusive.

> Marissa is cute and intelligent , but what's her strategy for Yahoo?

What does her attractiveness have to do with anything?

good ,so what product makes Yahoo relevant in 2013, Yahoo mail ? Sorry but the Tumblr deals only feels like a stunt to me.

They need a social network. Badly. All their other services, including email, belong to a bygone era (with the exception of acquisitions like Flickr).

Who do they need a social network ? are people going to move from Facebook or Twitter to Tumblr? No. They need a good an new idea , an innovative product that will draw attention. and a consistent strategy . People are fed up with social networks ( i.e. Google+ ).

Tumblr is not valuable at all for advertisers , unless you are selling porn...

What's Yahoo mobile strategy ? What's Yahoo's cloud strategy ? ect ...

I see no strategy , only buzz ...

I'm sure plenty of engineers at Yahoo have great ideas ,it's just feel like what's really broken is Yahoo's management. Why would they pay that much for Tumblr, really ?

>are people going to move from Facebook or Twitter to Tumblr? No.

Huhwhat? Of course they are. Do you not have friends doing this already?

I have zero friends that have left Facebook or Twitter for Tumblr.

I have a number of friends that have added Tumblr, but they haven't left anything.

Because I think social networks are the future, they will be to future generations what the world wide web has been up until today. Ignoring social networks today would be like ignoring the www in the mid 90s (aol online, msn).

Just because social networks are the future doesn't mean Yahoo needs to take on facebook head on (see: Google+).

Plus, Tumblr IS a social network, just not built in the image of facebook. So is instagram, youtube etc.

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