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Comment by jordn | Hacker News Reader

I do like how this article from yahoo finance has this heading and subheading:

  Yahoo! to Acquire Tumblr
  Promises not to screw it up

Fair enough. That probably is most people's biggest concern and expectation of what Yahoo will do.

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It's fantastic. Note that it's from their own original press release: http://investor.yahoo.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=765892

Does yahoo have a good track record of acquiring services and not frakking them up? Not a troll question, I stopped using yahoo in 1999 but for the occasional openid.

They didn't screw up Flickr. Then again, they didn't do anything with Flickr.

That seems to be their M.O., remember Delicious?

They kind of did screw up Flickr, just by virtue of letting it stagnate. They got lucky in that no one else really made anything better in the meantime.

...and then Instagram

...not to mention Facebook took over as the place for most people to share photos with their friends

I don't think Flickr and Facebook/Instragram really compete, except in the situation where people didn't need Flickr but Facebook/Instagram didn't exist yet. Flickr is more for professional photographers, not a social network for youths to share their photos with their group. If Flickr loses professional photogs, then they're hurting. But they haven't yet.

Instagram is not going to replace Flickr for Flickr's core audience.

Thats the entire point. Flickr is about photos. If Flickr was releasing new products and testing new things they might have landed on Flickstagram. But like OP said they didn't do much at all, and so missed the boat.

So yes you're right, they don't compete. But thats the problem. Hypothetical one, and I wouldn't blame the CEO for it. Its just one of the many things up the road they didn't travel up.

I think flickr gradually became a place "more for professional photographers" as the rest of its uses were eroded by other social media sites.

That being said...since MM took over, I'm seeing signs of life in Flickr. New mobile app, noticeable upgrades on the web interface, little things like that. I suspect Flickr is on her priority list.

If they'd managed flickr properly, there may have never been a YouTube or an Instagram. A competently-run flickr could've handled video (in a non-crippled fashion), and would've been anticipating and well-prepared for the mobile photography boom.

My guess is that flickr was being run by a bare-bones team in strictly maintenance mode, and the profits were funneled into other (money-losing) parts of the company.

I don't think its fair to compare Yahoo! under different CEO. They all had different goals and roadmap. The current Yahoo seems to be going towards another direction than its immediate predecessors.

Fair enough. But the big ships have a lot of inertia while turning and her efforts to change the corporate culture (something everyone says she is doing atm) will need time to give results. So she will have to use whatever teams and people she has available right now.

Not particularly. However, there is a lot of theorizing that Meyer could possibly be a fix to this issue. This acquisition is probably the first thing she'll be graded on.

Not really, but during the '00s Yahoo had a management culture where decisions were made by (painful, painful) consensus. Generally this led to stagnation in the acquired services, and when you're stagnant, you get lapped.

Meyer seems determined to change this, though. Impossible to tell how much headway she's made from the outside, but she's certainly saying the right things here. We shall all see in due time.

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