
Yahoo Weighs Spinning Out Hadoop Engineering Group for $1 Billion Opportunity - DanielRibeiro
http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/04/yahoo-weighs-spinning-out-hado.php
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icey
Yahoo! has quite a few impressive engineering teams that appear to be saddled
down by terrible management. Maybe this can be a new business model for them -
a high-end tech incubator.

Of course, they'd first have to stop habitually buying companies and letting
them rot on the vine.

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dillona
That's part of my issue with Yahoo. They have so many smart people who do
awesome things, but they'd rather spend all day trying to become a media
company.

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ora600
Cloudera is pretty much dominating the commercial Hadoop market now. It has a
huge marketing head-start and arguably better engineers, since it was founded
by Yahoo's employees who thought they can do better by leaving. They also have
more experienced support and training organizations, pretty much by definition
(Yahoo's Hadoop group didn't do that).

I'm wondering how Yahoo spinoff is planning to compete.

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SkyMarshal
>I'm wondering how Yahoo spinoff is planning to compete.

Well if I were the Yahoo spinoff, I'd do exactly what Cloudera is doing, then
look for ways to improve on it. It's still a new field, a huge potential
industry/problem domain that companies of every size and geography will
probably have some demand for, either now or in the foreseeable future.
There's plenty of room for multiple competitors, and it's still relatively
early.

It's been pointed out on HN before that a reliable way to make money is not to
do something new and groundbreaking that people may or may not want, but to
look at what's already in demand and making money and find ways to do that
competitively or better. Nothing wrong with what Yahoo is doing here in that
respect, more power to em.

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lotusleaf1987
|It's been pointed out on HN before that a reliable way to make money is not
to do something new and groundbreaking that people may or may not want, but to
look at what's already in demand and making money and find ways to do that
competitively or better. Nothing wrong with what Yahoo is doing here in that
respect, more power to em.

I think the term is 'fast follower' and they exist in every industry. Remember
all those local yogurt shops that popped up when Pinkberry became popular? Or
when Red Bull became popular Monster and Rock Star came shortly after. I would
also consider Samsung, Hyundai, Huaweii, LG, and a few others fast followers.

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mikeryan
I'm still a bit of the opinion that Yahoo isn't too far away from a yard sale
across the board. I think they might be significantly more valuable in pieces.

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inrev
Original Wall Street Journal article:

Yahoo Mulls Spinoff for Hadoop Software Unit
[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870472930457628...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704729304576287343518337646.html)

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anxrn
"We've been covering Yahoo's deepening interest in Hadoop over the past year.
The latest development came last week when Yahoo joined the Linux Foundation.
It was another signal of its focus on Hadoop and its further commitment to the
data analytics technology."

What does joining the Linux Foundation have anything to do with deepening
commitment in Hadoop? Supporting Linux makes sense if you're running it on
thousands of machines, while Hadoop is a platform-independent (Java-based)
stack.

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rll
Which primarily runs on Linux.

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anxrn
correlation != causality. There's probably a zillion other things that Yahoo!
uses that also run on Linux. Maybe that has something to do with their support
of Linux?

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phil
What a great idea this would have been 3 years ago.

