
The Decline of Yahoo in Its Own Words - adam
https://hbr.org/2016/06/the-decline-of-yahoo-in-its-own-words?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=harvardbiz
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mawburn
>Rather, Yahoo’s existing products didn’t work on mobile.

I wonder what this is referring to. All the Yahoo products I'm familiar with
(admittedly not many of them), could be adapted to mobile. Yahoo Answers could
have become completely addictive if easily accessible. Looking at a list of
all their other services on Wiki, I can't find a single one that "[wouldn't]
work on mobile".

The phrase "didn't work" is a cop out. If something "won't work" or "isn't
possible", then you just haven't thought of a good way to make it. Don't
pretend like things can't adapt and change.

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danso
Yeah, that assertion is baffling. Flickr is a photo service, it absolutely
could've worked well on mobile...one of the first paid apps I ever bought was
a third-party app that made it easier to use Flickr. Flickr famously was
caught unawares by the trend set by Instagram and, well, Hipstamatic. In the
news business, Yahoo News is very well known. Again, nothing inherently un-
mobile about that product.

Perhaps few of Yahoo products seem addictive enough to be mobile
breakthroughs, but that seems like a chicken and the egg thing. I liked using
Twitter a lot from the desktop, but having it accessible via phone made it
even more addicting.

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glenscott1
The Flickr mobile app is a great example of where things went wrong for Yahoo.
They both were too slow to spot a trend and poor at executing once they had.
Ironically, from 2008 onwards, there was a module on the Flickr homepage
showing the most popular cameras people were using. iPhone topped this chart
somewhere around 2009 and yet they still didn't take that seriously enough to
invest heavily in the iOS app development.

~~~
caseysoftware
And even worse, rewind to 2008 and the Flickr API was considered the gold
standard of API design. There were books written about it and it was regularly
mentioned at conferences.

They had all the pieces to build a great mobile experience. The interest and
support wasn't there from the leadership.

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yardie
It's kind of tragic to see them be late to the party that they helped invent.
The first apps for the iPhone were powered by Yahoo and the YUI library was
pretty usable on mobile early on.

The talent was there, the leadership was not.

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at-fates-hands
>> The talent was there, the leadership was not.

This is spot on and completely staggering to think about. Yahoo was there with
all of the other big search engines. They HAD to have seen the landscape
changing, they HAD to know what their competitors were doing and starting to
diversify their portfolios and offerings.

And with all that information, what did they do? Nothing. they sat and watched
their competition lap them time and time again, diversify, introduce new
products, move to mobile, and create new technologies.

I am completely mystified to how this could happen at such a huge company with
some very smart people working there. It's as if this was some grand pump and
dump scheme for a group of investors. It's like they _wanted_ it to fail.

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spriggan3
Yahoo had all the products needed to be relevant again. What was needed is
deep integration between these products. For instance, using Pipes in Yahoo
Mail to create a custom Flickr feed. That's service integration. How about
updating Groups UX/UI ? this product is obviously useful why does it look like
it was made in 2000 ? Or is there so much technical debt that one cannot touch
any code without having to rewrite everything at Yahoo ?

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distances
Was Yahoo ever big outside of the US? For me it's always been some invisible,
but persisting, corner of the Internet. Admittedly I've used some of the
services they have acquired (like Flickr and RocketMail), but none of the core
products I think.

Search was dominated by AltaVista up until Google, and for news and website
index services I would have used local papers and link collections. I don't
really even know what else was in their offering.

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spaghetti_taco
AltaVista straight to Google? You missed out on some great stuff! What about
Webcrawler, Hotbot or Metacrawler?

~~~
drdeadringer
Hotbot was my favorite. I even had an email address with them.

When they were bought out, I remember thinking "Damn, now I have to find a new
search engine to use".

~~~
soylentcola
So many times at work, misspelling "hotbot.com" and typing "hotbat.com" which
brought you to a porn site with some half-clothed woman suggestively holding a
baseball bat on the splash page.

Pretty sure it was just a generic porn site (never really looked into it) and
the "bat" thing was just a thinly layered gag to make an excuse for taking
advantage of the common typo.

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Scoundreller
Heh, I just checked out whitehouse.com (not .gov!), which now says (with no
images):

WhiteHouse.com Official Site

Celebrating our 19th Anniversary (1997-2016)

World's Most Famous Adult Site coming back Summer 2016

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niftich
How does Yahoo make money and how did its sources of revenue change over time?
Ads?

In search, Yahoo was handily beaten by Google, and competing against Microsoft
and Baidu for the rest. For webmail, Google won out, and Microsoft and Yahoo
tried to hang on. For ads, Google and Facebook trounced Yahoo. Flickr was
caught unaware by the rise of Instagram, and Tumblr resulted in them acquiring
a massive social graph, but no clear ability to monetize it.

Facebook (& Instagram), Google (& Gmail, Youtube), Amazon, Twitter are all
sites you'd visit while logged-in, so they can target ads better. Yahoo's
properties no longer draw the volume of userbase that remains logged-in all
the time, partially because you can get full benefit of their primary property
(Yahoo.com) without logging in, and partly because fewer people use their
gated properties in preference to their competitors.

But I'm not sure what they could've done to stop this. Microsoft is in a very
similar boat, and their first attempt to adopt Google's strategy to get
Microsoft content into everyone's hands faltered at the hands of third-party
app developers. Their second attempt, with Windows 10, might succeed. Yahoo
likely won't and can't take that route, so their hands are rather tied.

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MOARDONGZPLZ
What would "computing in an AI-first world," in the context of moving from
computing in a mobile-first world, look like?

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_rpd
I think he is just saying that machine learning is the next big thing (for
real this time).

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protomyth
I often think, given the number of uses of Yahoo Mail, that a social network
addition would have been extremely popular. I don't think the problem was ever
mobile, it was not seeing that the wind was blowing to social networks and
internalizing that. They even had the best photo site to post pictures on.

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csours
You just reminded me that I have a Yahoo Mail account... Its been so long
since I've even thought about that...

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perseusprime11
Believe it or not, the reason for decline is Google and Facebook. It's called
Ads.

