Why Yahoo Keeps Killing Everything It Buys
wired.com
wired.com
It tends to work out that the artists who spent the most for their degrees will lean towards it being "too forward thinking" more often than the rest of us.
Then there's the Yahoo owned services like Flickr, if you want to count them.
Edit: I just installed Yahoo Weather, and it's great. It uses photos to represent weather conditions at each of your saved locations, which are all pulled from Flickr. I doubt it has photos specific to every weather condition in every location, but I got them for all the locations I tried. And the animation in the interface (parallax scrolling between locations, spinning windmills for windspeed, and maybe more I didn't notice) is smooth and well done.
Pulling up a weather app and seeing a local landmark with a cloudy sky in the background is a really neat user experience, so props to Yahoo on successfully integrating Flickr with this. I like it a lot.
Not quite as bad but still pretty bad:
In December 1999, Intuit Inc. (makers of QuickBooks, TurboTax, and Quicken) purchased Rock Financial for $532M. The company was renamed Quicken Loans. In June 2002, Gilbert led a small group of private investors in purchasing the Quicken Loans subsidiary back from Intuit for just $64M.[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicken_Loans#History
She gets more press than most CEOs but Yahoo was in trouble before she took over. She might not be great but there are probably more overrated CEOs
Yahoo no longer controls their own destiny in search or search advertising. Yahoo had a better search advertising system (I was a customer) and probably a better search engine at the time.
I'm sure she would be the first person to want to invest in search and search advertising, but Yahoo basically can't do any of that in a meaningful way unless they can get out of their underperforming Microsoft contract.
Just remember that the benchmark for a CEO is not if they are doing a good job. It's if they are doing a better job than someone else would do in the same role. It's like NFL QB's. There's a small pool, so being good doesn't mean you get to keep the job if someone else thinks you should be doing GREAT.
By that measure Marissa has done a pretty great job in areas that the previous revolving door CEO's didn't. Hell, the fact that Yahoo! is even part of the tech scene discussion is an improvement.
Right on the spot sir.
Short memory, short career or just sexist? In less than 2 years at Yahoo, Mayer brought in unprecedented leadership in a byzantine group left unmanaged for years.
Doesn't Ballmer beat her wildly in being lucky/overrated 2001 to 2011? Remember the disastrous yahoo buy out in 2008? Talk of being lucky that it failed. Or Blackberry?
Mayer turned around Yahoo's perception and fixed key products. She pointed out a talent and reputation issue and tried to solve that (http://qz.com/184046/yahoo-says-marissa-mayer-has-fixed-its-...) - should Yahoo just have done and bought nothing because of increasing valuations?
There's no actual point to ad hom like this. Yahoo's strategy is not solely Mayer's. It may not be working, you can disagree with it, it's plain populist to single out Mayer.
Oh boy, here we go.
You bringing sex into the debate, your accusations of sexism and this point toward you being the sexist, if anyone is. She is CEO. She is almost entirely responsible and accountable for company strategy and performance.
Mayer has proven herself through the ranks of many prestigious technology companies throughout her career, but her performance as CEO has been an embarrassing disaster.
You have a funny definition of "many". She's worked at exactly two tech companies in her career: Google and Yahoo. For such a shrill critic of her performance, you're remarkably uninformed about what she's accomplished.
Hmmm, to me and everyone I know, Yahoo! Mail is where you send all the trash and unwanted spam. It's surprisingly common practice, and my perception of Yahoo! hasn't changed a bit.
This will one day come out as a massive scandal.
They send bot traffic and mix in PPC traffic to make it look "legit". when too many advertisers complain, this is the result.
Yahoo stock has gained 113% since July 2012, when Mayer was appointed. For comparison, in the same period:
Nasdaq: 38%
Google: 80%
Facebook: 83%
Even though I only used the email account they automatically set up for me for junk registrations (my main mail was already @home/attbi/comcast before they bought geocities, then gmail when that was created), I ended up making a second yahoo account with a name that wasn't lame (which I still used for junk registrations, and other random things, but moreso than the one automatically created). One day the password on that second email account suddenly changed. I used the same password on both the accounts for years with zero sign of infiltration. I still continue to use accounts tied to the one with the mysteriously changed password. I did everything I could to get that one back with no luck. Maybe I was compromised by some hacker? I do recall during my efforts being asked by yahoo support something along the lines of "is this your main account?". There was never anybody that I could talk to, only text support, and most of my attempts/ticket submissions went ignored. Maybe they think I'm a hacker.
In the end, nothing but bitter feelings toward Yahoo for me.
Assembler class on an IBM/370 was kinda fun.
If you can find a pic in google image search and pick "visit site", you can scroll through the albums.
If anybody happens to know something I don't about finding websites, the title of it was "Slasher's Realm" and I believe it was in TimesSquare somewhere, maybe under chasm or tower. Edit: ahh yeah, it seems like mine wasn't crawled before it got deleted http://www.reocities.com/timessquare/chasm/1788/
I hope you find what you lost. Let us all remember to keep local backups. :)
Warrick will rebuild the site using the Momento framework (which The Archive uses).
If you'd like (free) help, my details are in my profile. This is the sort of stuff I live for.
They bought some of the hottest startups back in the days (Flickr, Delicious, Upcoming...) only to neglect them, shut them or let them die. These were amongst the first companies that had put the user front and centre, leveraging the fabled user generated content. This was of huge value for any company and they let it slip through their fingers.
Also, at Brickhouse they developed Fire Eagle, one of the first services to work with location, and a great take on it too. A central and independent place where you could post your location to and then you'd grant access to other services choosing the level of detail (e.g. you phone was constantly posting your most accurate location and then Twitter could have access to your current City, Facebook to the Country you're in and Dark Sky could access Lat/Lon).
And, of course, they once owned Geocities.
Then they shut some stuff down, closed Brickhouse and I think they stopped hosting Hack Days. I know correlation does not imply causation but I find it very difficult to dissociate these two situations. How can a technology company thrive if they kill their innovation internal cycle?
Yahoo! seems to once have had one of the best innovation cultures in industry only to see it disappear like this. Everything that has been happening since then (like death by acquisitions) looks like part of the plan or the lack of thereof.
Upcoming is just another example: way ahead of its time. Take the number of companies in the events space nowadays. Take the millions of dollars invested or spent in such companies. Lots of meetups happening everyday around the world...
Yahoo! has just let it die instead. It's even hard to argue that Upcoming was off because it was ahead. I can't see why the events on Upcoming wouldn't turn into what meetups are today. All it needed was someone to take care of the product and the community. Gatherings and events have been happening since before Upcoming was created and are now being managed on Meetup, Eventbright, Lanyrd, etc... It isn't the case of these companies creating a new space for them, they just took it from where Upcoming (and others, probably) left.
Been there a few times over my career: Those acquisitions are, in almost all cases, a disaster.
I think yahoo.com is a great 'portal' - there's still a place for that I think
As shubb points out, if it's cheaper to buy a company than to deal with licensing or legal problems, then it might be bought. Same if the overhead of dealing with a company as an external entity is too high compared to buying it outright and forcing it to come in-house (if the product or service isn't of any need after some time, the employees can still be shuffled in the org afterward)
https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...
That is surely worth something?
When you calculate the stock price minus alibaba valuation increase, Yahoo is still declining (in fact Alibaba has MORE value than Yahoo itself, resulting in Yahoo having "negative" value)
I think this is a very insightful analysis. I think there are people that like the "yahoo" way of presenting applications. It may look old fashion to others, but there is a market. If it was not the case, yahoo would already be dead. If yahoo changes its mind to do the same as others, they would lose their soul and die. We have similar experience with RIM that left professional phones with keyboard to become an Apple follower. RIM is (almost) dead.
They still had a sizable lead in enterprise but even there they didn't fix some of their fundamental usability issues in a timely fashion, so a lot of enterprise customers started shifting towards Android and iOS.
Blackberry's problem is that it too them far too long to respond to a sea change in their market. Had their first true flagship touchscreen phone come in 2009 instead of 2013 they might still be a big player.
Most BB users I know absolutely loved the keyboard, and thought it worked much better than a touchscreen. It was also considered by many business users to be the only phone useable for business use because you could actually type quickly on it.
Those users also abandoned the phone, but I don't know if it was because of the touchscreen.
I think the reason they failed was "app store." Also they had a really crappy interface compared to iPhone and Android.
I can't imagine that a BBRY Q10 running BB 10.2.1 would not have more appeal than the android keyboard/touchscreen that you had.
I am one that would own a RIM phone, IF, IF, and only IF they had made it easy to code applications for it like Apple and Google did for their phones.
RIM noticed now and BB10 is seemly really interesting, but now they are too late, there are no apps on their phone.
And I say that, because I ABSOLUTELY HATE touchscreen, it NEVER do what I want, I own a Xperia Play, and many times I prefer to use the Playstation controls to control the phone, the touchscreen is unstable, finnicky, don't work when it is raining, or when my hand is wet, or sweaty, and so on...
BRRY(the company) is NOT dead.
They are still very much alive and still making and selling smartphones and other products/services.
IMO, they are doing a much better job of making them(smartphones), then they are of selling them, and if they continue on that trajectory they could well end up ... dead ... but
FWIW - Let's not put the body in the cooler until were sure that its actually not breathing.
There you go.
That makes even less sense than Facebook's central app, because at least you can look at Facebook as offering a cohesive, singular service. But even Facebook is unbundling because it realizes that it can offer a better experience if each app just focuses on a single component of their platform.
What is she thinking?
At least they can articulate a strategy.