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Comment by brianbreslin | Hacker News Reader

I saw this headline and my first thought was "what is this? 1999?"

Note to Yahoo.. there was this company Viaweb you purchased like 15 years ago, oh wait never mind I'm sure you remember.

The sad thing is that they might not remember. A new product manager at Yahoo! might be 22 - 24 years old, and that means they were under 10 in 1999. And Yahoo! has undergone a lot of churn over the years and staff turnover. It is entirely possible that much of the history has been lost.

While its clear from the announcement[1] that they do recall they had something called Yahoo! Stores before, I'm wondering if they really remember what worked and what didn't work from their previous version. Sort of all new and all of the issues from previous versions fixed. Or is it just all new look but we didn't do anything about the issues.

[1] "Today, we’re excited to introduce Yahoo Stores, a completely reimagined, next-generation version of our eCommerce platform" -- Yahoo! Stores announcement.

brace yourself, next year is going to be rocky. But Yahoo will survive.

we've found the periodicity of the startup groundhog loop.

Is it written in Perl?

It could be like Viaweb, and be written in Lisp.

Nothing about this looks 1999.

I think they may be referring to the oringinal Yahoo Stores aka ViaWeb.

..that was cofounded by PG:

Viaweb was a web-based application that allowed users to build and host their own online stores with little effort and technical expertise, directly from their own web browser. The eponymous company was started in July 1995 by Paul Graham, Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell. Graham claims that Viaweb was the first application service provider.[..] In 1998, Yahoo! Inc. bought Viaweb for 455,000 shares of Yahoo! stock, valued at about $49 million, and renamed it Yahoo! Store.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viaweb

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