Yahoo Chief: ‘We Have Never Been a Search Company’
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
They own many of the top content properties on the internet and they are very profitable (not as profitable as they could be, but pretty darn profitable). Sure they could have bought Google, Facebook, or any of the other companies that ended up being the top of search or social networking, but they didn't. So it makes sense to play in the games where they're successful.
It's like saying Michael Phelps isn't also a great athlete because he can't beat Usain Bolt in the 100 meter. Or vice versa. Google's content properties universally have failed to make a dent against Yahoo's strengths. So Google can't be the Yahoo of content and Yahoo can't be the Google of search. We should be okay with that.
At some point the market needs to stop judging them on what they might have been, and see what they actually are and might become.
Is it because Yahoo! isn't a "cool" company? Is it because RoR is so tightly coupled to prototype? Is it because they had kind of an unwieldy namespace before they updated that?
I find their XHR, event, and dom manipulation interfaces much easier to work with than prototype or jQuery - these are good until you need to do some serious heavy lifting. I've had several instances where I had to create XHRs manually because prototype just didn't give me the access I needed.
Quite seriously though, since jQuery and YUI came out at nearly the same time back in early 2006 - I feel that it has to do with the simplicity of the jQuery API and the active community that's grown around jQuery. YUI has always had better documentation (even though jQuery's has been good), so that can't be it.
A couple points:
- You can always do more complicated work with simple APIs but it's fundamentally harder to do simple work with more complex APIs.
- YUI didn't promote external plugins or development communities. For example the ExtJS library that grew up based upon YUI was left to stagnate and grow on its own rather than become part of YUI itself. If the YUI team worked to bring Jack Slocum on board YUI would be in a much more dominant position than what it is now.
- YUI has been closed to outside contributions for most of its life. No bug tracker, no outside patches, etc. It's only recently that they've truly Open Sourced both the code and the process surrounding the library.
I do find it to be odd, as well - YUI really should be more popular than it is. It's well written, well documented, and is well maintained. Even after all of that its market share is shrinking.
http://google.com/trends?q=jquery+javascript%2C+yui+javascri...
You may know more about it than I do, but at the time, it seemed like Eric Miraglia did try to bring Jack on board, but for some reason it wasn't a good fit.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ydn-javascript/message/94...
HTH, Ted.
http://refactormycode.com/codes/826-monthly-calendar-library
Of course, adding animation on adds weight in both libraries. Tacking on scriptaculous core + effects tacks on an additional 44kb. Tacking on YUI's animation and effects package tacks on 48KB of more featureful and sane API. If you want the entire (slow, buggy, and not very cross-platform) scriptaculous library loaded, prepare to load up 156KB.
tl;dr: unminified, YUI-dom-event + animation is 84KB unminified. Prototype + Scriptaculous is 76KB unminified. YUI is faster, has a more sane API, more features, doesn't pollute the global namespace, and doesn't insanely swallow and mute errors.
Oh, yeah, and it has better API documentation....
(sidenote: YUI framework is 10mb without docs, but that includes: minified, unminified, unit tests, and a metric shit-ton [technical term] of plugins. Of course, if you're going with prototype or jQuery, you've got to scour the 'net looking for plugins that do the same thing. They come packaged with YUI.)
Earlier, it was Google's % share of searches vs Yahoo's: a rather stark and quantitative loss every quarter and every year. Now, I'm not quite sure what it is but at the very least it is not that.
Changing the story changed their destiny.
I knew of a profitable print publication that had a readership of about 90,000 people in the 1980's. But management saw other publications in similarly sized niches that had 100,000. They fought tooth and nail to get those extra 10,000 readers and spent incredible amounts of money to get them. But it actually pushed them into the red.
There's something very powerful about focusing on your real market and doing what you're good at.
Yahoo now has a clear goal of becoming and acting like the number 1 content company on the web. I think this clarity will bring positive results.
http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch02_Have_an_Enemy.php
The nice thing about the Apple-Microsoft deal is that everyone still knew that Microsoft was Apple's enemy.
They are probably the number two internet property in terms of page views. If google has 70% of the search market and Yahoo has less than 20%, Yahoo couldn't possibly be competitive in terms of page views if they really were primarily in the search business.
My point is, instead, the ongoing bizarre otherworldly logic of their management.
I'm trying to think of a good analogy. Anyone want to chime in?
+“I am a very viable number,” she said.
+The guard, um, encouraged Brad Stone and me to treat Ms. Bartz with respect. “She’s my girl.” (???)
back then search was possible but excruciatingly slow - you could use other net services like WAIS or Archie but it was the sort of thing you'd leave running the background. Plus those services were terminal based so navigation was tedious if you were on dial-up. Having all that stuff classified and aggregated on one website was a godsend. The amazing part is that in its early incarnation it was so simple anyone could have done it. Literally, just links and descriptors. I've often wondered if attitudes of and towards Jerry Yang have something to do with the extreme simplicity of how Yahoo started out, and the 'right place right time' versus any definable innovation.
I never, ever thought of Yahoo as a search engine - if I did a search there, I assumed I was searching their internal catalog rather than the whole internet. Lycos and Altavista were the search engines of choice, while Yahoo was the homepage where I went for aggregated content. Then one day I tried Google and never went back.