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> if they stick to their guns and simply improve Tumblr without lowering its value to the community, I can see a real future for Yahoo, one where it isn't just irrelevant, but where it makes it's own products and creates new and exciting applications.

I fail to see the connection between the acquisition of Tumblr and your vision of Yahoo suddenly becoming able to create new and exciting applications on its own as a consequence.

According to Wikipedia, Yahoo's main source of revenue is search and display advertising (by far). By purchasing web sites without any business model and trying to monetise their traffic, they remove value from these sites (for the user) and add nothing that these sites couldn't have done by themselves, in exchange for huge amounts of cash that could instead be spent on developing those "new and exciting applications".

They might get some value out of the talent they are acquiring with Tumblr on the long run, but I doubt that it'll be worth that much.

The connection is that success tends to beget success, Tumblr will give them a great platform to build their own cool applications on top of.

Honestly, I don't believe this is a 'Buy Tumblr and stick an advert in every <div>' deal, it just doesn't make sense, they know from experience it will destroy the ecosystem of Tumblr. It would make so much more sense to integrate Tumblr with their own products and build on top of it.

Success absolutely does not tend to beget success. There are radically more examples of success not begetting success, than the other way around (and that always has to be true numerically). There's nothing about past success that favors future success, and I'd argue it's the opposite: success today makes it even harder to maintain it tomorrow, as the market will assault your profit centers relentlessly with competition.

Just ask AOL.

Or ask Yahoo.

Or talk to HP about Compaq. Or ask Gateway how their success beget success.

Or talk to HTC about how their early Android success beget even more success.

Or ask Borders and Blockbuster.

Or AltaVista and Lycos and Excite.

Or travel back in time to 1992, and ask IBM how all their success delivered them a massive wave of red ink.

Or Netscape.

Or ask Sun what happened to their incredible sales momentum circa 1999.

The list is extraordinarily long in tech alone.

A portion of the recent disdain / negativity seems to come from the recent cull of work from home employees and statements regarding the value of working from an office to Yahoo, there was quite a bit of anger directed at Mayer for that.

You must be new around here (said in jest).

HN has had an anti=Yahoo bias for a long time; the reasoning behind the bias keep changing ("layoffs", "delicious", "WFH", etc.), but it always seems to be there.

I wouldn't rule out individuals with individual axes to grind, but most of the anti-yahoo sentiment is based on: their track records of no interesting products, acquiring and then squandering interesting products, and management decisions that run counter to HN's preferred "attract and retain top tier talent" approaches.

The reasoning doesn't change, just the examples.

See Also: snide comments about Microsoft.

If Google continues its current growth trajectory and Yahoo! sticks around, I wonder how long it will be before people start rooting for Yahoo! as the "underdog".

Given the sizes of those 2 companies. I'd vote for https://duckduckgo.com/ to be the ideal underdog.

Err, that happened quite a while ago. I think people were rooting for Yahoo just before their (failed) Panama Adsense competitor was released. (I say "failed" in the sense that while it kind of worked, it didn't match AdSense's results)

Your comment doesn't make it clear if you realize just how much bigger Google is than Yahoo. Google is worth $300B, Yahoo around $30B.

I think most, if not all, of those heaping scorn on Yahoo! would definitely like to see Yahoo! succeed and provide some viable competition to Google and Facebook.

I think the word "bias" is wrong here.

Generalisations are dangerous, but I think the people on HN generally aren't Yahoo fans because traditionally they don't appear to value good engineering.

PG summarised it quite well:

But Yahoo also had another problem that made it hard to change directions. They'd been thrown off balance from the start by their ambivalence about being a technology company....The worst consequence of trying to be a media company was that they didn't take programming seriously enough....Yahoo treated programming as a commodity....One obvious result of this practice was that when Yahoo built things, they often weren't very good. But that wasn't the worst problem. The worst problem was that they hired bad programmers.

http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html

I think the majority of the anti-Yahoo bias is simply from the company still being alive, despite not having done anything right the last decade. A functioning market needs companies to fail quickly.

I use a yahoo.com email address (created mid 90s) to subscribe to mailing lists etc. But I check it thru Thunderbird or K-9 email clients. I just visited the Yahoo website after several years and it looks like it could have been designed in '99. You'd think with a billion dollars to spare they could hire a couple of good designers who know their CSS. I guess Google's website has also looked the same for a long time but Yahoo.com hasn't the elegance or the sheer usefulness of Google.

Wow, I actually was just about to go check it out so I could say you were wrong, but I can't really disagree. The upper and left elements have some of the clean/flat trend, but the rest of the page is ridiculously busy.

I could see both sides of the argument and not wishing to drag the thread on to a tangential discussion I do believe that it is better for the company in the long run, though perhaps not best for some of the companies individual employees.

Marissa Mayer's actions since becoming CEO remind me a lot of Steve Jobs' after returning to Apple -

First, get rid of the stragglers and people who don't believe in your vision. MM did this by ending remote work at Yahoo, and Steve Jobs did it by gathering everyone up and telling anyone who wasn't on board to "get the hell out" [1]. This will get rid of all the unmotivated and/or pessimistic people who might hold the company back.

Next, focus heavily on rebranding and spend a crapload of cash to convince the public that your company is different now. Steve Jobs did this with his famous "Think Different" ads [2], and Marissa Mayer seems to be doing this by making big PR waves with big acquisitions of mobile-centric startups. Hopefully this will make your company "cool" again and make the "A players" actually want to work for you (again).

And then of course, build a bunch of awesome products and then TAKE OVER THE WORLD as Apple did. We'll see if Yahoo can do the same.

[1] http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=3067

"Anyway, so Steve said 'You know what, we're going to build a great company. We're going to reinvent the world. And anybody who believes me, like let's get moving. If you don't believe that will happen then get the hell out."

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Different

These are good points, but I don't think it's possible to not see Yahoo as a behemoth. It's a big company, with lots of executives and fiefdoms. Just because there's a new CEO doesn't mean the kind of change that needs to happen will happen (and conversely, it's wrong to lay all the blame at Meyer's feet if things don't turn out well).

Case in point, look at how badly JCPenney fared after Apple retail exec, Ron Johnson, became CEO for just 17 months: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/business/ron-johnson-out-a...

The fact that Yahoo can lay down $1.1 billion in cash is a show of how big the company is. That is both an asset and a liability, when it comes to the existing corporate power struggle.

edit: I'll give an example of which I'm familiar with, as a user: Flickr. I joined Flickr after Yahoo acquired it and have been a happy, paying user for nearly 4 years. However, I'd be at a loss to count all the new drastic feature additions that have come in all that time:

1. A new mobile app (which I don't use)

2. a nicer horizontal-masonry-like gallery layout...which, flabbergastingly, only applies to some collections of photos and not others

3. HTML5 uploader

And yet still, I count myself as a happy Flickr user, which means that prior to Yahoo's acquisition, Flickr was a great service to begin with. From what I can tell, as a data-minded person, Yahoo has done very little with all the interesting data that comes in these voluntarily organized and submitted photos. I don't get much help with auto-tagging or auto-grouping of collections. The Flickr logged-in homepage is nothing but a short list of the last few people who "favorited" a photo...there's been almost nothing done in four years to get me to engage more with the Flickr network.

And Flickr's domain covers items of a very discrete nature...easier to do interesting analysis and data-operations on than I feel one could do with Tumblr.

So while Flickr's relative stagnation is not Meyer's fault...the fact that we can say, "Well, it's not her fault that Flickr is meh five years in a row" goes to show you how massive a company Yahoo is and how hard it is for everything to move/change even when a new CEO comes in.

> Case in point, look at how badly JCPenney fared after Apple retail exec, Ron Johnson, became CEO for just 17 months

Not that I'm disagreeing with anything you're saying, but I would like to point out that the changes Johnson implemented are now widely seen as terrible mistakes on his part, alienating huge swaths of the existing customer base. The problem wasn't that "fiefdoms" got in the way of reform, it's that the reforms were actually just poor choices.

Conversely, you could argue that Apple was similarly a huge dying behemoth when Jobs took the reins.

A CEO can make a huge difference on the upside and the downside (and of course they can also make no difference at all).

Right, but it's hard to tell what are just inherently bad decisions and what are bad decisions given the context and company culture. Some of Johnson's bad decisions were because they didn't gel with JCPenney's culture...however, to my point, it's possible that Johnson's choices could've worked great if the JCPenney's culture were more flexible.

Yes, it's the CEO's job to make decisions based on what she has at hand and what she knows of the ship she's steering. But I think this underscores the point that the nature of the ship is as important to the CEO's initaitives as the quality of the initiatives themselves.

So to say, "let's ignore that Yahoo (in the opinion of some) has been a creaky, slow-moving ship for the last 10 years and see it as an entirely new ship now that it has a new CEO" simplifies the situation a little too much.

And that's why CEOs get paid a lot, even though they seemingly don't do much actual work.

The current business trend is to disrupt and unroot established stuff in large organizations. It's always a high-risk, high-reward endeavor.

The Ron Johnson story is interesting, as he was so successful at Target and Apple. There was definitely alot of ego and refusal to adjust to the signals the market was giving JCP. But the store within a store concept and lack of clutter is a big deal and will ultimately serve the company well.

The world needs yahoo. It's great for competition and a place for startups to exit, rather than companies like pinterest acquiring sites to shut them down.