Comment by coffeemug | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coffeemug | Hacker News Reader

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There is a great Q&A with Steve Jobs (I can't find it right now), where he explains that you can't sell billions of dollars of product simply by building interesting (or useful) things -- you have to develop a coherent strategy and think through how different pieces fit together. Similarly, you can't jump dump $10m on a hundred research teams, and expect to turn Yahoo around.

I used to be in academia and I'm running a startup now. I'm absolutely certain that generating computer science research papers, even brilliant ones, is a heck of a lot easier than the absolutely insane focus required to ship breakthrough products.

From what I can tell, Yahoo now has a phenomenal environment for people with this level of focus. As for the castles-in-the-sky research people leaving Yahoo, it's probably better off for both the research people and Yahoo. It's got a new business to build -- funding research papers that go nowhere does nothing to advance that goal.

This is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE

For those not initiated, OpenDoc was a multimedia document format developed by Apple before Steve Jobs came back to Apple, which was when he violently killed OpenDoc.

Wish he was alive for a few more years :(

Killed it and allowed Microsoft to boss them around another couple of decades thanks to office monopoly. Google is now getting close to end this.

Google ending Microsoft Office's monopoly.

That's funny.

Honestly not unthinkable in this day and age. Maybe office becomes the corporate niche thing, and everyone uses g docs or a tablet/phone app at home.

I suspect an interpretation, if not grandparent's, is that one monopoly is being traded for another.

gdocs still has a long way to go. It's a harmless toy compared to Office, and I'm very far from being a power user.

Well, my place of work uses google drive exclusively. That's 60.000 people less paying office licenses for Microsoft...

This is the power of branding. Even if Yahoo came out with better search technology than Google, it would be incredibly difficult to unseat it now - you would need to be at least one order of magnitude better, like Google was compared to Altavista when it stole its crown. And even in that case Yahoo would need to use a different brand anyway (like Microsoft is trying to do with Bing)

Steve Jobs certainly had a keen eye for business. You can tell from interviews. Probably one of the greatest businessmen in tech. To me, it's his greatest legacy.

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