Comment by sakopov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sakopov | Hacker News Reader

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Yahoo! simply boggles my mind. I have no idea what they do well as a tech company anymore or why they're still around. Their homepage spams with news about Kardashians and other celebrities along with horribly written articles by Yahoo! journalists. Every once in a great while you'll read a great but rare REPOST from AP, NPR and other major news sources. Otherwise, they're squeezing every drop of any kind of mediocre news about a cat getting stuck on a tree with a 10 minute video description performed by some Yahoo! bubblehead.

They've shutdown any interesting projects like pipes, maps, search or any other area of innovation. Anything that's still around is just rotting on the outskirts of internet. When was the last time anyone heard of YUI? The Yahoo! email experience is quite terrible and buggy with frequent service outages. They're purchasing these random startups and generally show lack of any direction. It just seems like their execs get in the room together and go "What the fuck are we gonna do today, boys? Let's buy a fashion startup! Do we need it? No, but who gives a shit. Our users sure don't." And I genuinely think that most users don't. They're just stuck on Yahoo! because they don't know how to change their default homepage.

I don't know... I'm just glad they haven't killed Flickr yet and I have a place to follow some great photographers.

I really wish I had enough karma to downvote this opinion. It just reeks of ignorance and short-sightedness.

Polyvore is far from a "fashion startup". It has a very substantial user base and their whole proposal allows for very natural (and kinda cool) monetization strategies. Also, we don't know how much Yahoo paid for it, it could've been a real bargain; apparently around 60M, kind of cheap if you consider they've been pulling profit from years now.

You want examples of real companies that seem to be adrift? Try looking at Twitter. Or Google (although they have some real good products that keep the ship floating).

I can see that with Twitter, but Google? How is Google adrift?

I see Google a little adrift in many of their new ventures, from Google+ to date. But, however, they maintain a pretty solid strategy in the fundamental products that generate most of it revenue, which is pretty much the ad market.

I think that the urge to diversify their money, coupled with, "well, we have a lot of money" is causing Google to invest in many things that eventually turn to dead-ends. That makes Google seem a little adrift, from my perspective, but nothing that would put their business at risk.

They gave us* another season of Community, so that was cool.

*Although what they gave me specifically was "Geo Restriction - Sorry! The content provider has not given us the rights to play this video in your location." It's the thought that counts I guess

Yahoo! mostly attracts Mid-Western housewives. They know their users pretty well. I read somewhere Facebook's ~30% of users are mostly of these Yahoo! types. And these users are probably more likely to stick around. Hey, the internet is for everyone! :)

The Yahoo! email experience is quite terrible and buggy with frequent service outages.

Part of the reason they're still around is because people like you still use them for email.

I have an almost 16-year-old email account with Yahoo that I started forwarding mail from a couple of years ago. I'd love to close it but it's hard to get rid of something that's been around for that long.

Yahoo wins by appealing to the mass market, lowest common denominator.

Do you honestly expect the same quality of journalism from Yahoo as the new york times etc.?

If you think of them as a global media company then Yahoo! is much easier to understand.

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