> In 1998, Yahoo turned down the opportunity to acquire Google for $1 million. Yahoo made six acquisitions that year, spending $107.3 million.
> In 2002, Google offered to sell again for $1 billion. Yahoo hesitated and Google raised its price to $3 billion. Yahoo declined at the higher price. Google went on to become a trillion dollar company.
> Yahoo attempted to acquire Facebook for $1 billion in 2006, but Mark Zuckerberg turned down the offer. Had Yahoo increased its offer by just $100 million, Facebook’s board would have forced Zuckerberg to take it. Facebook also became a trillion dollar company.
In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo.
In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo.
I absolutely agree.
One fundamental reason why Yahoo failed is that they prioritized short-term revenue from search partners, over long-term reputation. One of the key people behind that was Prabhakar Raghavan.
And now, Prabhakar Raghavan is at Google. Where he has proceeded to make the same mistake, with the result that Google Search quality fell off of a cliff.
If Google had been acquired by Yahoo, he would have been in a position to destroy Google earlier than he actually did.
An increase in searches isn't necessarily a positive thing. Anecdotally, I've increased the number of Google searches I do simply because it now requires multiple attempts to frame my query in a way that provides the results I'm actually looking for!
Seems logical to me, but then my 71 year old mother with doctorates in both science and literature pulls out her phone and trusts Google AI results without thinking twice.
how much did internet usage increase that year, in terms of the number of people and hours spent? what changes happened in the app ecosystem that had google as a default search provider? what other service offerings shut down or degraded that caused people to move to google? how much did chrome browser usage increase over IE and Safari?
there are so many factors to this, its the same issue when target stock drops 10% over a year and people are like "oh it's because they stopped selling plus size bikinis! the crowd has spoken!". you can attribute it to anything but you're basically always wrong if you're not attributing it to at least a dozen different things
What do you do when you have a product whose value will inevitably drop in the medium/long-term? Squeeze every penny out of it while you still can. There is no solution to the SEO arms race, like there was no way Yahoo's blandly curated portal could stay relevant in the era of social media. He's the right man for the job. Google search has been doomed for a long time. It is another Yahoo.
LLMs have, for me at least, mostly replaced search. Because one of the most common things I search for is stuff like 'what is the function in [x] that does [y] in [z]'. Search for that on Google (or any other search engine) and your results will be complete trash. Search for it on an LLM and it's one of the few things they're nearly perfect at.
Search engines, especially with the resources of Google, could have developed at least basically functional natural language search decades ago. Instead they chose to rest on their laurels (pagerank even still plays a significant role!), and secure market control by anti-competitive behavior.
Google is certainly well on their way to becoming another Yahoo, but there's no extrinsic reason for it in the same way there was no reason for Yahoo to become what it became. In 100 years people will be searching the corpus of human writings (or whatever medium is dominant then) for information that's relevant to them. So there's in intrinsic reason for any search related company to just naturally die. It simply needs to keep innovating, or at least evolutionarily improving.
> Because one of the most common things I search for is stuff like 'what is the function in [x] that does [y] in [z]'.
This is also the type of search that Google makes no money from.
The money is in searching for up-to-date relevant product information, where Google is the undisputed leader.
>Search engines, especially with the resources of Google, could have developed at least basically functional natural language search decades ago
Google is one of the major AI research outfits, and arguably the only one that continues to deliver consistently over the last 2 decades. Statistical Machine Translation/Google Translate, Adwords Quality Score, TensorFlow, AlphaGo, Attention is all you need (Transformers), AlphaFold all Google innovations.
You can't really blame the prevalence of SEO slop on Google. It's not the lack of want of trying, it is hard technically (see how long it took to develop modern AI capabilities), expensive computationally (as we can see with the unsustainable cost of test-time search in ChatGPT) and in terms of user-experience.
>Google is certainly well on their way to becoming another Yahoo
Really, it isn't. Google is in the unique position of being the closest technology company to achieving full vertical integration of their value chain, from silicon to software to data to end-users. They are also at the forefront of frontier AI, including productising the research output. I don't really get the Google hate on HN, apart from maybe the YC/sama bias.
Your answer sounds very artificial. For instance "AI" is in no way whatsoever required for natural language search queries. There was some spreadsheet program back in the mid 90s that even supported natural language operation description - and is something that should also be obviously supported now a days. Even the adventure games of the same era often had natural language interfaces. It was quite useable even if obviously severely limited by minimal R&D put into it.
It was an obvious way to create a better user experience but instead search today is comparable to, if not worse than, search 20 years ago - because at least 20 years ago companies were ahead of the SEO guys, whereas that relationship has long since flipped.
What makes you think that Google hasn't developed natural language processing, when they launched Google Translate in 2006?
Also, what makes you think that NLP would solve the problem you're describing? Only LLMs has proven that it could fully understand and process the queries in the way you're describing, hence why I brought that up. However it is expensive computationally, and only recently was it even technically possible to do.
Most searches, even in natural language, are extremely simple. Google could certainly have added this functionality, but they chose not to. This is how old giants always die. They become so obsessed with further squeezing their users that they begin to stagnate, decline, and eventually completely miss the writing on the wall - and face disruption.
I will tell you all you need to know about Google - I was doing some research for a product I am building, my daughter (age 12) was an inspiration for what I am building and I asked her if she had time to help me with something and she did. Told her to “google ____” and she started laughing HARD and called me a boomer for suggesting she use Google… :)
These aren't incompatible issues. Google has a monopoly maintained by excessive and illegal anti-competitive practices. The majority of users have no clue how to even change their default search engine, which Google actively exploits. Just checking it out - it took no less than 6 clicks into various specific menu and sub-menu settings to do so.
Poll only the subset of people that are actively aware of how to change their search engine and I suspect Google's dominance suddenly completely disappears. Remember, there was a time when Internet Explorer was the leading web browser across all age groups. Then Microsoft was forced to make it easier for people to change their default browser, and suddenly nobody was using IE anymore.
My apologies, I did not mean to imply that my kid's humour is evidence of Google's demise. But it does make you wonder a bit... we use Google out habit (they used to be decent) and also because they pay boatload of money to be default search on iphone and myriad of other reasons but younger generations do not have that intimate relationship with google and can see "with fresh eyes" its usefulness compared to the alternatives ...
> The money is in searching for up-to-date relevant product information, where Google is the undisputed leader.
Actually for products, a lot of people just go to Amazon has a thriving ad business.
> Google is one of the major AI research outfits, and arguably the only one that continues to deliver consistently over the last 2 decades. Statistical Machine Translation/Google Translate, Adwords Quality Score, TensorFlow, AlphaGo, Attention is all you need (Transformers), AlphaFold all Google innovations.
The problem with Google is that they can’t produce good profitable products. Innovation means nothing for a for profit company if it doesn’t make money.
Easy. Google is basically spyware. It's an advertising company, and their product is you.
>searching for up-to-date relevant product information
I realise I'm not a typical user, but I would never trust Google for any searches hinting that I'm looking to buy something, because the results are almost guaranteed to be inorganic. Someone will have paid Google money to be promoted for "best clothes dryer".
>Easy. Google is basically spyware. It's an advertising company, and their product is you.
This is such a flippant and facile response.
Google isn't a advertising company, it is a tech company that gets the majority of its revenue via selling advertising. This can change, and also likely to change in the next decade or so.
The reason things are is that nobody was willing to pay for search - it's a product with a very low incremental cost. The market dictated this operating model, and nobody has been able to upend this model so far, not even OAI. The numbers just don't work out. Do you think OAI can continue to subsidise free ChatGPT queries with paid ChatGPT Plus subscriptions? Almost certainly not.
I think actually people probably are willing to pay for search - Google just did such a damn good job for so long it made it impossible for a competitor to pop up
And now that their core product is getting worse I am paying for search
How else should someone take the statement 'that is the type of search that Google makes no money from' when someone explained what type of searches they do? If Google doesn't make money from it, they don't develop it for search apparently, which is why they haven't progressed in search beyond advertising. You can argue that it needs disrupting, but concluding that 'they make their money from advertising' when that was directly stated by you is not flippant or facile, it is deduction.
You can't eat your cake and still have it. If they refuse to develop an income stream that isn't related to advertising while using practices that use their dominant place in the market to buy other technologies or shut them down, then saying it isn't their fault that the revenue is only advertising is either disingenuous or naive.
Yea this is just pure bs.
If you had taken to search for the name, you'd have found the wiki explaining the name's origin. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raghavan
Also,Raghavan is most probably his father's name and Prabhakar will be his given name.
They never said he was there in those years or was involved in the failed acquisitions. Had Google been acquired then, yes, eventually Raghavan would have been calling the shots.
> In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo.
Having worked for Yahoo, I have to agree. Acquisitions were always seen in terms of "what can they do for the Yahoo brand?" and "How can we cut costs by migrating this to Yahoo tech?", not "How can we grow this business?". A Yahoo owned Facebook would have been suffocated like Tumblr and Flickr were.
Now I want a counter factual story about Yahoo acquiring Facebook, which then never flourishes into the influential network it became. What happens to society? Would we have the same political climate?
I feel like SOUTHLAND TALES, a movie written and shot before the iPhone was released, is quite helpful here. The movie emphasizes all of our post-9/11 failings in American culture at a time before Facebook or Twitter or any of the social media nonsense people blame the current awfulness on. The problems we face as Americans are far deeper than "cell phones" or "the Internet".
I want to know this too! If I invent a time machine, I'll message you but till then here's my ungrounded take (Obviously everything here is my personal opinion and not evidenced)
The current political climate has mainly happened because capital interest has taken control of unregulated news and opinion. Meta are a particularly bad example of this, but as long as there's money to be made by providing a platform for polarising politics and fake news, then I think someone will do so.
Who knows, maybe in that alternate universe you'd be posting "if Yahoo hadn't made such savy choices, I wonder if we would have the political climate we have today?"
> The current political climate has mainly happened because capital interest has taken control of unregulated news and opinion
This has always been the case for as long as society has been consuming the news. “Business tycoons” have bought up newspapers and media outlets since forever to push their narrative.
I think one component that has changed is the sheer volume and diversity of media makes competition for your attention (clicks) all the more fierce. Enter The Algorithm and optimizing for metrics above all else.
I dunno. That doesn’t invalidate anything about the original question about what present day would be like without Facebook. Would something else similar have replaced it? Is Facebook really “the problem” or is it algorithmic content because algorithmicly driven content was going to happen facebook or not.
It wasn't that bad when we had the Fairness Doctrine, which was removed in 1987. From there you could see a steady slide in US politics as polarization increased, from the Clinton scandal, to Gingrich and then Bush 2000. By the time Facebook hit it was already too late.
The Fairness Doctrine had a very limited influence on the media in general. It's power has been vastly over stated as of the last 15 years.
It was only applicable to broadcast media, and rarely enforced. Nearly all of the enforcement was on behalf of private individuals wanting free airtime to respond to negative new stories about them.
In my opinion it's a very bad idea to want political appointees to decide when an issue hasn't been given fair news coverage. The very idea that there is only 2 sides to an issue reinforces the two party system that has made media so biased in the first place
It's because of the fragmentation of news sources that can now be customized to one's preference with any finely sliced political cant desired. Three television networks maintained a measure of neutrality in their reporting. Mainstream print media did too albeit to a lesser extent. Wackjobs had a hard time finding each other to form a tribe that would destabilize society.
Before the rise of social media, the mainstream news ignored both things going on in minority communities like police violence and ignored rural America. The MAGA community and Trump himself bypassed the mainstream media because of social media.
America has always been polarized - institutions just never gave them a voice.
> The current political climate has mainly happened because capital interest has taken control of unregulated news and opinion.
We're seeing the opposite, though. As the traditional media companies declined and the masses gained a greater ability to voice their own views, polarization increased.
As someone who tries to avoid the news and politics, it's pretty easy to avoid the companies selling them. But I keep running into them because there are lots of users on Hacker News/Reddit/etc. who try to interject it into every discussion they can . Invariably, these people don't come at it from the point of view that they might be wrong and the other side might be right; they act like zealous crusaders on a mission to vanquish evil.
I don't dissagree, but I think I'm using "news and opinion" more loosely. To my mind, facebook putting your sister's political rant into your feed above your uncle's fishing pictures, is a kind of wauly of profiting from devisive political opinion. Even if it is more subtle than the NYT publishing a think piece.
Yes because before the current media landscape, politicians didn’t win elections by using dog whistles (Willie Horton), making some out group the villain or “segregation now. Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever”.
Why are people acting like this is ancient history when my still living parents grew up in the segregated south and as recently as 2014 there were cities that still had segregated proms?
This is no media exaggeration. Forsyth county was notorious for this until the early 2000s. I (a Black guy) had a house built here in 2016 and sold it just last year when I relocated. While my son was one of the five Black guys in his entire school, we never experienced any issues so I don’t want to cast any aspersions toward Forsyth as it exist today.
Poul Anderson [1] in its short stories Time Patrol has this theory that the past can be disturbed to some extend, some things have to happen independently of particular individuals or events.
As a let down as it is for readers interested in how the author handles and solves time paradoxes (it is better than the insipid and sloppy multiverse solution, though) - Time Patrol are mostly history-focused action stories - this theory makes sense to me. At some point the world gets "ready" to discover things because all the pieces of the puzzle are in its hands. In the case of Facebook, I believe it is not an accident or "because Zuckerberg"; a massive social network had to emerge, in particular due to network effects.
Yes, but, would they be any where near the level of what FB achieved? Take Truth Social as an example. It started because people wanted a place they get out of the larger group to dedicate to like minded. In this Philip K Dick style rewriting of history where FB was created by those behind Truth, would it have ever achieved critical mass?
Just because someone else attempts to fill in the vacuum of something else not being there does not mean that it will succeed in filling the void. Truth only survives on the cult of personality, not because people really want to be using it or because it's like a good product
> Take Truth Social as an example. It started because people wanted a place they get out of the larger group to dedicate to like minded.
Not at all. It started because Trump was banned from Twitter. That’s it. The whole point was to give Trump a platform. There is nothing organic or natural about Truth Social and if it is the symptom of anything, it’s that some people just have too much money.
I kind of disagree in that the giving him a platform is just the cover for the actual purpose which is a way for anyone to shovel him money through a "legitimate" means to avoid any sense of bribe or quid pro quo. Very similar into how certain countries that wanted to curry favor made long term rental agreements for property owned by Trump. It was only slightly less obvious than dropping of bags in the oval office with $ marked on them.
Haha what? It’s the literal opposite mate. We’ve had an explosion of independent and non-capital aligned media. No matter what your brand of crazy is, you can find the “thought leaders” and community for you.
There's another comment along these lines too. I think my "news and opinion" phrase sounded like I exclusively meant mainstream news. But I was thinking more generally abouts "news and opinion content" like Breitbart, X comments, facebook rants, etc.
Yeah the explosion of the internet has allowed some conspiracy schizo person in the US to connect with another schizo conspriacy person across the world in Moldova to quickly find each other online and then confirm each others schizo beliefs.
Believe in flat Earth? Are you a holocaust denier? Think the moon landing is fake? Is the government gang stalking you? Welp you are in luck, there's thousands of other people just like you and here is a forum.
Yes, probably. But there's a spectrum. The UK has quite strict rules on air time to differing views (you can't air a climate change story which presents climate denial as the only opinion as news). I think those rules lead to a better system, not a more government controlled one.
Ironically, we (the UK) have the BBC which is fairly literally, government funded (not controlled) news. It's much more even handed than a lot of commercial news.
Britain's political culture is a bit of a disaster though. Kier Starmer was the best they could find in the last election and as far as I can tell even the people who voted for him don't seem to support him in the main. This time last century they controlled 20% of the worlds population and sat in a vast network of trade and technological innovation all feeding back towards the British Isles.
Then through basically an ongoing refusal to engage with political realities they've managed to transition to the number 5 and dropping economy in nominal terms and, realistically, probably don't have the industrial oomph to back up the paper numbers. There was political debate recently over whether the country should even be able to produce steel. Per capita the picture is a bit worse, and on a PPP basis they're actually a hair below the European average. They've also managed to become relatively politically isolated because no view seems to have gained ascendancy over what their foreign policy should look like.
Now it'd be unfair to blame it all on the present crop given the huge amounts of damage done in WWII, but it is a bit difficult for me to accept the trendlines of the UK compared to the recovering USSR countries or China/Taiwan while believing that there is a healthy political discourse. The high performing countries have done amazing things even from a standing start in the 70s, 80s and 90s. From such a dominant starting position, with the momentum of the old empire and technically being on the winning side of pretty much every major conflict and ideological UK politics seem to have done rather badly. The country is wildly average for somewhere that was so ahead of the game relatively recently and with so many opportunities to succeed in the interim and such poor quality of candidates allowed to hold power.
We would have had something else with same effect. The age was ripe with social media, orkut, Facebook, MySpace, and so many others I cannot even remember.
One analogy is local news media ecosystems across the US, which have generally looked pretty similar though not 100% identical over the past ~125 years or so, suggesting some determinism based on broader culture and technology.
If Facebook had stumbled, something else would have gotten the next microgeneration of college students and then their parents and grandparents.
It’s possible to me that an independent Instagram would have filled Facebook’s niche a few years later, and something like Snapchat would have taken the current Instagram niche. Maybe Twitter would have played a different role.
It’s also possible a web 2.0 answer to classmates.com would have grabbed the older crowd, and we’d have a slightly more profound age split.
But ultimately I think we’d end up where we are — a set of platforms algorithmically curating feeds of user-generated content — with a few cosmetic differences.
Facebook's hook was that at first it was only at certain colleges, and then it expanded but I think you still needed an invite to join. In the early days it wasn't full of high schoolers and junior high kids like MySpace was. Facebook really used exclusivity and FOMO to drive viral growth.
Facebook is pretty bad for society, but Twitter has also been quite bad. IMO Twitter has always been the real problem. Facebook replaced Email as the channel of choice for your weird relatives to spread conspiracy theories. And that is bad, but it is just an enhancement of a constant thing.
Twitter: all the journalists and elected officials signed up and decided the stuff that went on there Mattered and was News. The shitposts that showed up in their feed became social trends.
It is a widespread failure, but if we had to pick a thread that we should call the start of that part of the unraveling, I’d point at Twitter. I mean, that’s just the social media bit. Social media didn’t cause, like, Afghanistan or whatever.
Yeah, all social media has been pretty toxic for society. But Twitter has been especially bad. Turns out that requiring everyone to use very short messages means that interactions devolve into short, hot takes almost immediately. And then people just get angrier and angrier at each other as they fight back and forth via those barbs. Twitter couldn't have done more to unravel the social fabric if they actively tried to.
I think if bay area companies had behaved differently in early treatment of Facebook I don't think we would have ended up with such a paranoid/aggressive Facebook and things would have been much better, even if Facebook still became super successful. I think some of those early purchase attempts/behaviors are WHAT made Facebook the bad thing it became. Wonder if the juicy stories ever come out.
No it would just be a bunch of happy people messaging each other on Yahoo Messenger. We were never meant to see the inside of the brain of the average human put on public display.
Delicious was the only useful bookmark manager ever. Nothing ever came close to replacing it. Though for me the “social” part was pretty useless (plenty of actual link aggregators out there to discover content at the time)
…god remember the “tags” phase of content organization?
Delicious was cool because of the constant streaming of links and things that I was able to discover back then. I would sit there and just click on links, finding good content
For me it was always: Google, YouTube, Reddit and forums. There are also niche sites that cater to certain groups and interests like Steam and Twitch for gaming or IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes for movies. There is no universal content discovery platform or engine(besides maybe Google).
Flickr incentivized uploading a lot of photos with metadata and was highly searchable. It was great for photo hobbyists building a personal archive for others to peruse.
Instagram was for smartphone photos and playing with filters to set a vibe, and ephemeral sharing with friends and people you wanted to impress. It’s hardly searchable at all.
It sounds like an Instagram style app, with Flickr as the backend would be ideal. People could still share for fun from their phones, while actually being able to find and organize old photos, if they wish.
Exactly. If Yahoo was capable of nurturing Google into what it became, it was also capable of simply becoming that first. But it didn’t, because it wasn’t run by the same people who ran Google.
And I’m not saying that only Page and Brin were the only ones who could have made Google, only that they clearly were two people who were capable of doing it. However, Yahoo was not run by such people. So Yahoo would have bought Google and would have made Google conform to Yahoo’s culture, probably relegating Page and Brin to lesser roles where they couldn’t drive company culture.
> In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo.
Yeah exactly. Also I would consider the Overture acquisition extremely successful because their patent lawsuit v. Google gave them 8% of Google pre-IPO. If held (which it was not), that is a substantial asset today.
You are spot on, but you are drawing a slightly wrong conclusion, IMHO:
Yes, Overture what the best Yahoo! acquisition ever made.
But Yahoo!'s greatest mistake was to settle the Google lawsuit for a few million dollars - which meant that Google could keep using Overture's (parented) invention of keyword bidding based advertising; without it, Google may never have found a way to become profitable.
So Yahoo! bought its own gravestone for $50m, when all they would have had to do is stand firm and go to trial.
If Y! exercised its government-awarded monopoly rights for keyword auction based advertising, there may still be that Y! portal that was so prominent in the early 2000s.
PS: Yahoo Inc. is not full gone - Yahoo Japan remains the last independent part of the former Y! - see https://www.yahoo.co.jp .
Sure; but (IIRC) at the time Facebook was burning cash and the board could have threatened future funding if he refused the offer. He may have been able to get more funding anyway but the larger point is these things are never as simple as the legal docs might imply.
Yup It is power dynamics always, legal documents only matter in court.
At the time in 2006 there were plenty of competing networks and any one of them could have climbed to the top.
Facebook wasn’t unique tech wise by all accounts one huge 20k line main file not like Google with PageRank or pegs viaweb written in Lisp or Amazon with early aspects of AWS.
FB could have been replicated and with right money scaled by anyone else , the challenge was there were series of spectacular growth and failures in the social network space
The tech innovations started first with Hack as a PHP compatible language couple of years later then things like relay , graphQL, react and so on.
Where I live, the early Facebook apps were the killer feature of the early days of Facebook.
Genuinely asking, what other software company did something like this back then? I'm tempted to say (tounge in cheek) FB was the original PaaS, but maybe im not old enough
Flash Apps hosting which was Facebook did then was not ground breaking at all, There were many other competing flash hosting sites .
The killer thing others couldn’t do Facebook did was make available social APIs for the app developers to integrate into their platform to make the apps viral, which benefited both them and Facebook.
OG PaaS in the Web 2.0 age IMO was the google app engine , it predated all AWS offerings and gave an actual application runtime .
The follow-up after Jerry Yang initially refused Ballmer: somehow Jerry had a come-to-Jesus moment and decided to sell but by then Ballmer changed his mind. Jerry even chased Ballmer on a golf course trying to sell but to no avail.
It is an interesting thought experiment. Would Yahoo have become Google, or would another company have taken Google's place, or perhaps something entirely different would have played out. Would we have had Android? Would we have had Chrome, or Google Maps, and so on
The board is in control of any company.
Having the controlling votes means being able to reappoint the board but would have to do so by following the company's constitution which may take some time.
For example, some companies only allow reappointing board members at certain times of the year.
I'm still not seeing any mechanism by which they could force him to sell, though. Even if the board fired him and he couldn't replace the board right away due to the corporate constitution, how are they going to force him to sell his shares if he doesn't want to?
Shareholders of companies are "along for the ride" and simply participate in the decisions of the board. In theory if they fired Zuck and appointed a interim CEO and directed that the company get sold, then it could have happened and Zuck would just be allocated his percentage of the value paid by Yahoo.
In practice I would guess there would be lawsuits filed immediately to hold up any such activity until he had time to exert control of the board, but it would have been interesting nonetheless.
So you're saying that in principle, the board could have forced Zuckerberg to sell his shares even if he didn't want to? It seems like it should be wildly illegal to forcibly deprive someone of their property like that.
The board is supposed to act in the interest of _all_ shareholders, not just majority or controlling. Meaning, a group of minority shareholders could sue for discrimination as happened at Tesla recently.
Also, I’m not sure of the ownership structure, but he may own 57% of voting stock but a minority of non voting stock, and the non-voting members may have certain rights irrespective of voting rights. I’d be shocked if they didn’t negotiate some kind of escape hatch.
Wondering the same, would love if someone could explain it. Hypothetically if Founder / CEO have 100% voting rights and all current public shares have non-voting right, the board could still fire the CEO?
i.e The only way to prevent this from happening would be to stay private?
After those companies didn’t sell to Yahoo, they went on to develop new things, which led to growth. If Yahoo has bought them, they’d just let them get old and fade away, eventually shutting them down… or at best keeping them around with minimal maintenance. Yahoo is where once great sites go to die.
I guess the question is how many other companies did they correctly identify as not being trillion dollar companies. They will be optimizing for different things than VCs. Also, it is very possible they would have run one or both into the ground, making them bad investments anyways. We like to dunk on Yahoo with our perfect hindsight, but they were probably reasonable decisions at the time. So yes I agree with this comment.
The truth is that bad leadership and no clear vision led to Yahoo's decline. They went through over half a dozen CEOs in a short span and each had a different strategy.
They failed to buy Google and Facebook, instead they bought GeoCities, Tumblr, and Broadcast for billions and ran them into the ground.
> In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo.
Having lived through several acquisitions - both as a founder exiting and as an employee being acquired/acquiring...
Very rarely does the acquirer have the vision to see when the acquired company has a better long term trajectory. The CEO who does the deal might, but the senior management team and line managers usually just intentionally and unintentionally rob the acquired company of resources (cash, people, marketing, facilities) and then the exodus of smart people begins. It takes a very special team to make acquisitions actually add up to 1+1=4 most are lucky to get 1+1=0.5.
> In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo.
People also like to point to how foolish of Blockbuster it was not to buy Netflix when they had the opportunity to, but I’m also inclined to believe that the merged companies would never have made the decisive moves involving streaming video and content production. It’s tempting to say that Amazon would have filled in the streaming video gap (although perhaps late enough for feature film and TV piracy to proliferate a little further into the mainstream), but I wonder whether Apple would have adapted its iTunes service into Apple TV first. (Another dark horse I like to think about here would be RealMedia which may have identified a niche.)
There is no strong method for predicting the future. Acquired/could have acquired in particular doesn't have predictive ability.
"Acquiring" is meaningless. Even "plans for the company after the acquisition" is meaningless. Credible reports of motivations that would lead the acquiring company to take a hands off approach to the company acquired means at least a little bit, having now seen companies taking that approach not immediately killing the golden goose.
And yahoo! leadership agreed. They probably intended to just bury the tech and keep some staff which is why they didn’t pay the asking price. Had they thought either of these properties were transformational they’d have paid.
Tumblr was 2-3x bigger than reddit apparently at acquisition time (just looking at google trends). Now reddit is public at 27B market cap, and tumblr is virtually worthless. I don't think there's anything fundamental about tumblr that would have prevented it from being the one in the sun instead. They're not dissimilar, and they could've used those years to grow tumblr in whatever direction they liked if there was indeed something stalling it.
I know a fair bit about this deal. Some massive percentage of Tumblr's traffic was porn. And, shockingly, Yahoo management did NOT know this when they signed the check.
I do miss them being one of the biggest FreeBSD contributors. For a long time in the late 90s / early 2000s Yahoo was to FreeBSD what Netflix is now (and maybe a bit more). They used to host a lot of the FreeBSD build/test infrastructure and employed several src committers and they contributed heavily to a LOT of work that has made FreeBSD a viable OS going forward.
For example, they contributed heavily to the SMPng project (which made FreeBSD into a modern, multi-theaded kernel with fine grained locking). They even hosted the kickoff meeting: https://people.freebsd.org/~fsmp/SMP/SMPmeeting.html They employed Peter Wemm, who did the majority of the work for the AMD64 (eg, x86-64) port. And lots that I'm forgetting about probably..
Many of the Netflix engineers a decade ago, especially the ones that contribute to FreeBSD, are ex-Yahoo.
Yahoo was dying when Netflix was growing, and a couple of the best engineering leaders from Yahoo came over to Netflix and brought all the top talent with them, and they gave them the freedom to innovate.
I've been there, working on FreeBSD performance since 2015. I wouldn't say "many" of the early folks. From memory, I think it was more like 2. Granted, 2 of the earliest. More of the early folks were ex Level3.
That was in the openconnect team but we had a lot of ex-Yahoo throughout engineering. For example the entire observability team was ex-Yahoo when I got there in 2011.
Yes, we migrated over to Linux for a number of reasons, among them 1/higher developer mindshare, and 2/Linux had better SMP performance for the first decade or so vs. FreeBSD as we started to buy beefier multi-core and multi-socket servers.
Having worked at both Yahoo and Amazon, I don't think that's necessarily true. Amazon has a strong culture that's reflected in our Leadership Principles and has survived multiple significant tech stack changes over its history. Yahoo was never quite so principled as much as it was quirky and fun.
An underreported part of the Yahoo story is its relationship to India. I worked there during the Verizon years and heard the history. Yahoo was a forerunner of the "offshoring" of technology jobs to India. It moved lots of core operations to a small army of engineers there. They figured out that their American counterparts made substantially more money than they did, especially the middle managers. Waves of Indian employees began moving to Santa Clara and getting market rate wages. Suddenly, Yahoo wasn't saving as much money as they used to. I don't think it was a major factor in its overall financial decline, but it had some effect I'm sure. On a side note, I heard a couple of Indian engineers say they were moving back to raise their kids because they didn't like the cultural influences in our schools. There were many interesting lunchtime conversations about things like that.
> On a side note, I heard a couple of Indian engineers say they were moving back to raise their kids because they didn't like the cultural influences in our school
They didn't like the cultural influences by a culture which advanced their life prosperity so they relocate their children back to the culture where they will have to learn everything again by themselves.
I think the issue was the people running it were the type of people who are taught to ruthlessly look at a spreadsheet and decide if Coca Cola can invest X in marketing and product development they can expect to get Y back (with reasonable accuracy). Of course with software small teams can do big things so these calculations are almost impossible.
Investing a billion dollars in your search engine in ~2008 might be considered insane of course. We were told by Carol Bartz at an all hands that they had done the work on their spreadsheets and they could not compete with the investment Microsoft and Google were planning. It still annoys me to this day that there was no discussion or attempt to decide if the engineers and the company were up for the challenge with Google, even with less money. I'm not saying Yahoo! would have won, but to not even have bothered trying still irritates me - where is your vision? where is your fight?
Anyway this is my take on it, the management decided to just give up on being technically excellent and even being a software company at some point. The mind boggles why you would do this while software was eating the world and you had loads of fantastic engineering talent...
It was only just over a decade ago I used to play lots of the online games hosted on Yahoo and it was great! I had just started dating my (now) wife and we used to hang out every evening in an online video conference and play online versions of Pool, Risk etc, and as it was all inside Yahoo's ecosystem we only had to login once and we could automatically play each other.
Going further back, Yahoo's web directory was also a good and fun way to explore the world wide web. When Google appeared, and its search was so good, the concept of "people don't need bookmarks any more" seemed to spread, but in the process the joy of discovery was lost. Rather like how browsing DVDs in Blockbuster means you could find something really cool by accident, but searching a database means you have to have an idea what you want to find to begin with.
As a ex-Yahoo! from 20 years ago, I have a very clear opinion about the downfall of the company: Yahoo! had spent years structuring itself as a "media" company - not a technology company - but nonsensically, it also wanted to be Google. Yes, Yahoo! had parts of the company that were extremely technologically advanced, but they hired Hollywood execs and MBAs to run the company through the 2000s - people who had no real technological vision at all.
Yahoo!'s greatest strength and primary role in the Internet could be summarized as this: It was the most useful site on the web. Users relied on it for their start page, email, finance, weather, news, sports, maps, casual multiplayer games, forums, instant messaging, answers, fantasy sports, evites, photos, and an amazing amount of search traffic. It was a one-stop shop for everything you needed online. Maybe not the best in every area, but always pretty good.
You know how Google starts and kills products constantly? Yahoo! rarely did that. It saw interesting business models, copied them or bought into them and kept them going and users loved them for it.
And all of this was profitable, just not Google-level profits. Remember Jack Welch's mantra of GE not having to be number one in every market as long as they were number two or three and were profitable? At one point, this was Yahoo! and they could have remained relevant to this day had they embraced this role.
But the company's divisions were siloed and competed against each other in a way that makes Microsoft machiavellianism seem like a Sunday picnic. And the leadership was obsessed with Google and wanted to outdo them, even though they had a completely different culture and mindset. It was never going to happen. Regardless, they ignored Yahoo!'s bread and butter services, confused their employees and customers, and generally ran the company into the ground.
Yahoo! needed strong leadership that understood the company's strengths and built on them to continue to be useful to web users. Sadly, that never happened.
I remember in the late 90's switching from yahoo to google because google's search results were better. I also set my homepage to google because the homepage was so fast to load, it wasn't all cluttered up like the yahoo homepage.
I remember when I saw google for the first time, it was while searching for stuff on the redhat website, and I saw the Gooooogle at the bottom. I guess google had indexed the website for them. That led me to check out the google web site itself.
I think at some point that google was indexing the web for yahoo, I could be wrong though.
Whenever Yahoo! comes into discussion, no one talks about the other side of Marissa Mayer, the former CEO who fucked up Yahoo so bad. I had a friend back then who used to tell me how toxic the work culture had become in there. She apparently openly hated men and discriminated against them in the name of empowerment (and subsequently lawsuits were even filed). She was a glorified senior manager from Google basically who had no idea how to run a company. The Tumblr acquisition was proof. Most of the employees had lost faith in her after that acquistion basically. She, on the other hand, took away millions home while everyone who had invested their sweat equity and trusted her even one bit got screwed royally.
I don't know the finer details of that, but weren't they already travelling towards obscurity by the time she arrived?
Yahoo was a defacto entry point into the wider web and as Google gained popularity I think the average web savviness of people meant people had less reasons to arrive at Yahoo. Having a search deal with Google at least guaranteed their relevance for a while.
As a Y! employee for a couple of years - although my time was brief, I can say with confidence that had Yahoo successfully acquired Google or Facebook, both would have been destroyed in short order.
Nobody can beat Yahoo in making bad deals. Lets not forget they made Mark Cuban a billionaire with a legendary Broadcast.com acquisition at $10K per user! $5.7 billion dollars written off in less than two years.
Yahoo was structured wrong from day 1 to ever be great. At the core, it was a company with an unremarkable product that quickly became irrelevant as search engines took over. A directory of the internet was the naive kind of thing that required little skill or vision. That's what Jerry Wang built. That's what Yahoo was. Good idea at the time. Well executed. But not exactly rocket science. And it had a short shelf life and was soon forgotten.
But it had money courtesy of lots of pre-dot com bubble stupid money that investors were flinging around. So it bought things that others had built to grow. And for a while that worked.
It had more resources and toys than Google. But over time Google outperformed them on essentially everything it bothered doing. Better search engine, better mail, better news, better video (twice because Google Video was better than Yahoo Video before Youtube dethroned it), etc. These are all areas where Yahoo belatedly tried to gain ground through acquisitions and failed; over and over again. They always came in second or third with essentially anything they touched or tried.
By the time Marissa Mayer (ex Google) came in, Google had already won and Yahoo was this big stupid conglomerate of many things that were kind of alright individually but clearly never going to add up to Google. And the rest is history. Marissa Mayer flailed for a few years. There were more acquisitions and a few flopped projects ran by her personally. None of it mattered.
In the process, they ran Flickr into the ground. They ran Tumblr into the ground. Etc. They built a well deserved reputation of poor stewards of great stuff that landed in their laps. What they bought was quality. But they couldn't maintain that quality or nurture it.
Yahoo is a great story how all the money in the world can't make you a great company if you start out being a mediocre also-ran. If you are running blind, because you have no vision, deals like Google and Facebook will woosh right by you. That's what happened. And arguably, it wouldn't have mattered, because they'd likely have screwed those companies up as well.
It would depend on where you are pinging from and if they have anything closer to you to respond.
From where I am, google averages 4ms, yahoo is at 200ms+. Obviously because they dont have the money or marketshare to bother putting anything for me to route closer too.
Same experiment from my gigabit link in Silicon Valley. Looks like Yahoo is about 3 times slower but far more consistent
--- google.com ping statistics ---
20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 6.918/23.419/294.037/62.272 ms
--- yahoo.com ping statistics ---
20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 78.056/78.940/80.940/0.811 ms
Although what's interesting is that Yahoo is really more like 10 times slower (almost every ping was in the 6-8ms range), it's just that there was just that one packet at 300ms and other at 30ms that really blew out the average.
Another football in the Verizon Yahoo/Shuffle are those Verizon customers who were sold to Frontier but had verizon.net email addresses.
Verizon kept control of those lightly-maintained email accounts and pushed them into the Yahoo/AOL infrastructure. Users with a verizon.net email address had webmail access at mail.aol.com.
Verizon didn't make life easy. They changed POP/IMAP/SMTP servers every year or so. Just this May they changed again, from smtp.mail.yahoo.com to smtp.verizon.net - but the old servers still worked until the AOL outage 2 days ago.
During the years in between, customers got caught between AOL's mandate to use OAuth and Microsoft's refusal to support it in Outlook.
FF to now-ish and Verizon is purchasing those same FiOS customers back again. One more smack with the Verizon ping-ping paddle.
> but the old servers still worked until the AOL outage 2 days ago.
So that explains why my dad's email suddenly couldn't send outgoing messages (the configuration, for years, was outgoing.yahoo.verizon.net with normal password). After what felt like an hour, what worked was changing it to smtp.mail.yahoo.com and using OAuth.
It has caused no end of trouble for older folks who are still using yahoo.com and aol.com and sbcglobal email addresses who can't get any sort of sane support and are having a nightmare time getting into their email accounts that are linked to everything they've signed up for in the last 30 years.
People blaming the acquisition failure by/from Yahoo for the downfall are misinformed.
The reason for Yahoo's failure was its loss of dominance in search to the Chrome Browser.
Google's few actions made Google what it is today, and that starts with a few most critical:
- Launch of browser ( Chrome browser ). It didn't even become a meme against Internet Explorer, but also defeated Mozilla Firefox in its own game.
- Acquisition of YouTube.
- Acquisition of Android.
They are already doing other crazy innovation that makes them dominate the Industry.
While Yahoo was only famous for
- Yahoo Answers ( Quora took over that ),
- Yahoo Mail ( Gmail took over that ),
- Yahoo Chat ( the golden days ), and this one - Yahoo failed to capitalise with the change of ERA, WhatsApp would have never succeeded, if Yahoo had innovated its chat and entered the Mobile app segment.
> The reason for Yahoo's failure was its loss of dominance in search to the Chrome Browser.
I'm afraid your timeline might be a bit off there.
Yahoo outsourced their search to Google in 2000 [1] while google didn't buy android until ~2005 and chrome didn't come out until ~2008 [2]. And before google, yahoo had outsourced to 'Inktomi' and before that IIRC to 'Altavista'
Yahoo wasn't even trying to compete in search. This was the era of companies like "AOL Time Warner" where people thought web portals were media companies, and company bosses spooked by the dot-com crash were trying to diversify into tangible assets.
> And before google, yahoo had outsourced to 'Inktomi' and before that IIRC to 'Altavista'
> Yahoo wasn't even trying to compete in search.
Yeah. This is a common MBA-ism: focus on the top of the value chain where the largest margin exists.
The theory itself is actually not wrong, TBH; it's just that Yahoo misidentified where the top of the value chain lay. They thought the top of the value chain was the users, and that sponsered content was the product. Google correctly identified the users as the product and the advertisers as the top of the value chain.
IOW, Yahoo sold curated content (product) to users (customers). Google sold users (product) to the advertisers (customers). To Yahoo, the people visiting their site was the top of the value chain if you're directly pitching products to those users!
I was searching on Google and the AI result was "According to Hacker News" then gave a huge result from the comments. Google is doing their best to disrupt themselves before someone else does.
Yahoo literally did every wrong move and turned every move that could make it become successful again down, almost as if it deliberate. I can't believe it still exists.
I went back half a year in her account, and it seems like it was entirely re-Tweets and self-promotion? It would make sense if the algorithm isn't prioritizing that kind of content, or that kind of content isn't gaining traction.
I saw she re-Tweeted something from Bryan Johnson. Looking at his account, he has less than half as many followers, but many more likes and a lot more engagement. But it's almost all his own content, and it's content that readers would actually find engaging.
Nobody currently uses Twitter so follower count implies nothing. Lots of notorious figures have posted regarding how they get the same interaction rate on Bluesky even though they supposedly have 10x or even 1000x more followers on Twitter.
There was an algo change a couple of weeks back. I saw a few accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers saying they were getting only dozens of likes on their posts. (mostly accounts that had dissed Musk, so factor that possibility in)
I checked Mayer's account and it's not under any sort of shadowban that's detectible with the regular tools, which are usually very accurate.
I can’t, but influence is bought and temporary. People aren’t found off the person, but what she represents in society. And since she spent 8 years buried at Yahoo!, busy executing the winddown plan (masterfully), she may have inadvertently communicated that she’s expert in liquidation. Not something you follow when you want to know what the future is.
(Insert a distasteful joke about how she would have made a killing at DOGE).
In all fairness, that really stands to reason: retrospective analysis is enormously much easier, more precise and less risky than prediction, for the simple reason that after the fact (especially this long and with lots of inside people having spoken up since), there is enormously more data available than before it went downhill. So it's much less a question of having guts than of having access to sufficient data to see enough of the whole picture.
I agree and would’ve written the same several years ago. Unfortunately, shorting is expensive and you have to get the timing right, too, not only the direction of the stock. If you’re early when shorting, you’re still wrong.
I interviewed at yahoo during the tenure of Marissa Meyer and decided not to join after noticing a strange lack of diversity in my interviewers (I saw a similar lack of diversity at Apple Pay much more recently), anytime top level organizations become infested by monocultures, it becomes impossible for progress, new ideas and innovation to take foot. It doesn’t matter which clique or group has infected the organization by giving priority to conformity over diversity, it all ends the same way. This is not a call for institutional DEI, this is about being on the lookout for monocultures in innovative organizations.
I think Yahoo faded into irrelevance since it viewed itself as a media company and not a technology company.
Many internet companies fancied themselves media companies in the 1990s and 2000s. They all are on the scrap heap now, some examples: AOL, Yahoo, Excite@Home, Lycos, iVillage, About.com.
The companies of the time that fancied themselves technology/infra/logistics did well: Google, Amazon, eBay/PayPal, Salesforce, Akamai, DoubleClick.
Of course any lists like this have selection bias, so maybe I am wrong.
In an odd turn of events I have ben one a regular user of Yahoo! despite how terrible the experience and content is. It shipped as a Safari default years and years ago and has remained in my neglected Safari bookmarks for no particular reason. I’ve recently reverted to using Safari on iPhone as my default mobile browser and used to rely on my recently used tabs for a quick dopamine hit. Several months ago Apple removed that from the new tab experience, putting my bookmarks front and center. So I use Yahoo. It’s mostly clickbait content, heavily monetized, with all of the excrement of 20 years of AdTech on display. Ads routinely load in the wrong unit size, or with a double quote character that breaks the sticky container making it impossible to view the next page of comments. Most often the ads are mobile redirects that just crash the page and lose your scroll position. It’s really a terrible experience to behold. At least I don’t use social media.
I recall the Zookeeper paper from Yahoo scientist which basically details a more useful version of Google’s chubby. I find reliability and design of Zookeeper fascinating these days cool kids use etcd mostly because of relatively complex protocol of Zookeeper (there is a few implementations but they lack the polish of Java client).
Many applications depend on ZooKeeper's data model and client libraries, and can't switch to etcd. Things like watches and ephemeral nodes are different there.
iirc problem of the zookeeper was that it was a chunky java application. etcd is tiny go binary. so there is more to it than just complexity of the protocol itself.
del.icio.us was my favorite tool on the internet for a few years (perhaps even still in retrospect). And not far off from the same functionality as Facebook (today). Why purchase such a thing to shut it down?
Money which needed to be burned I guess (for accounting tricks).
I wonder how much macroeconomics and politics had to do with Yahoo's situation.
During this period, the US had been exporting large amounts of dollars to foreign investors (US going into deficit) and these foreign investors didn't know what to do with all those dollars so they dumped them onto the US stock market. This has been going on for decades. It was the premise of the Japan carry trade.
US companies like Google or Facebook would have had access to plenty of capital during this time and maybe it allowed them to be picky.
Every now and then, and especially in the past 3 - 4 years I really want to recreate Yahoo, or a curated Web Directory. Bring back the small Web, and a small gif for all webpage saying they are featured on yahoo.
95% of today's Web site are now complete garbage. And with AI written content I wont be surprised if this is now closer to 98%.
Yahoo did have a unique ability to smother any business that it acquired -- and I think the reasons go way beyond an inability to monetize them. In fact, I'd argue that it was actually Yahoo's fixation with short-term monetization strategies that eventually turned everything to dust.
Consider Flickr, which Yahoo bought for about $25 million in 2005. If you're a tech visionary, you look at this popular little photo-sharing site and say: "Wow, everyone's connectivity speeds are soaring, and we could morph this into a video site, too!" And then, maybe, you've invented YouTube.
Or, you look at the way Friendstr and Facebook are getting traction, and you say: "Wow, what if we built out easier commenting and a social-network feed with abundant sharing of popular photos among users' pals?" And then maybe you've invented Instagram.
But Yahoo's metrics-driven managers refused to stretch their brains in this direction. I've been told by two famous-name insiders at the time that Yahoo's approach to everything was to set short-term targets focused on existing metrics, with rigid focus on hitting quarterly targets. It was all about driving orderly growth of what was already there, rather than any desire to explore new and uncharted areas.
In essence, Yahoo had a Silicon Valley address but a Battle Creek, Mich., mindset. Purple logo aside, Yahoo owed a lot more to the way W.W. Kellogg had been running its cereal business for decades, as opposed to anything going on in the 650 area code.
That's actually the point. Yahoo in 2005 had the financial muscle -- and an interesting starting point via Flickr's user base -- to spin up its own version of YouTube without needing to do an acquisition. Stronger Yahoo leadership would have stomached the get-started costs of an internal build-out, because of a sense of what this could become.
Yahoo just lacked the imagination and nerve necessary to see how its own assets could lead to the next big thing.
Yet Google failed to build a social network, Apple failed to build a car and Microsoft failed to muscle its way into the mobile market.
And now Bytedance beat every US competitor, including Google's YouTube, Amazon's Twitch and Facebook's Instagram with what? An app that lets you upload 10s videos.
This doesn't actually answer what went wrong for Yahoo!. The main insight is that Yahoo! saw that it made money from traffic, so it bought traffic generators without regard for if the traffic could be profitable. I buy this argument, but Yahoo!'s problem was people stopped going to Yahoo!, and none of its acquisitions were big enough to offset that.
How about possibly also failing for being too US centered, basically being an "internet portal" but mainly for the US. Sure Yahoo where _huge_ 2000, but it was never the main goto portal in Scandinavia where I grew up using internet from the mid 90s.
Here Altavista was the defacto standard for search until Google replaced. For the portal aspect of Yahoo, there were local alternatives with more relevant material.
Really rare to find a company with such a bad luck, judgement and the cascade of bad decisions; it's strange that after all of that, they're still hanging in there
I started using Internet actively around 1996 or so. For me Yahoo practically didn't even exist, their homepage was a hodgepodge of everything and I couldn't figure out why I would go there. My search usage was mainly AltaVista with some HotBot, Northern Light, and Raging Search mixed in. But never Yahoo.
Yahoo wanted to be internet's hotspot for everything....ironically enough Google become that despite the fact that they rose to power because of their minimalism and search focus.
Instead of saying what went wrong for Yahoo (default state and expectation), it is worthwhile noting everything that went right for Google and Meta. Alternate theories don't amount to any insight apart from hindsight is 20/20.
We had a really bad manager join my company recently, and the company has begun to go downhill. Many years ago, this same manager worked for Yahoo. I can't help but feel like this manager is at least partially responsible for Yahoo's downfall, in a sort of butterfly effect way.
I miss Yahoo Games. My favourite was dominoes, many hours spent in there as a teenager. The only Yahoo thing I've accessed for the past decade or so is Finance, the stock price info and the investing news seems to still be reasonable.
I think that Marissa Meyer had given yahoo back a bit of its lustre. That meant cutting dividends in favour of investment. Restoring a reputation takes time. I stopped taking an interest when she was ousted by impatient shareholders.
I am not an insider, maybe I am wrong.
She wasn't ousted because shareholders were impatient. She was ousted because under her leadership Yahoo had collapsed to the point that the only thing left to do was to sell it.
When a new CEO is brought in to right a sinking ship (which Yahoo very much was at the time of her hiring), their number one responsibility is to have a solid core strategy based in leveraging the company's existing strengths and then execute competently on it.
She had no solid core strategy. Her strategy at Yahoo, as she described it, was "to throw lots of spaghetti at the purple walls and see what sticks"; which is exactly what she needed to not be doing. She blew a lot of money on a lot of very varied things and ended up with lots of expensive puzzle pieces with no plan for how to fit them all together into something that would stop Yahoo's bleeding.
At the end, the company as a whole had a valuation less than the company's Alibaba investment -- she drove Yahoo not just to zero, but past zero; and that's 100% due to her not understanding how to lead a shrinking company.
I wasn't there but from talking with people working there it was a culture of waiting for the next paycheck and staying under the radar, not caring and not doing much work.
Some 20-30 people I chat with were all the kind you should immediately fire and escort out of the building. Some had their next job lined up already just in case. lol
Sure, but Google is not inflating due to a cosmological constant. If Yahoo had acquired Google, Google would now be worthless, not a trillion-dollar company.
I like how MSN manages to pack so much content onto a single page—it’s surprisingly intuitive. I’m not sure why that kind of formatting isn’t more common.
> In 1998, Yahoo turned down the opportunity to acquire Google for $1 million. Yahoo made six acquisitions that year, spending $107.3 million.
> In 2002, Google offered to sell again for $1 billion. Yahoo hesitated and Google raised its price to $3 billion. Yahoo declined at the higher price. Google went on to become a trillion dollar company.
> Yahoo attempted to acquire Facebook for $1 billion in 2006, but Mark Zuckerberg turned down the offer. Had Yahoo increased its offer by just $100 million, Facebook’s board would have forced Zuckerberg to take it. Facebook also became a trillion dollar company.
In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo.
In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo.
I absolutely agree.
One fundamental reason why Yahoo failed is that they prioritized short-term revenue from search partners, over long-term reputation. One of the key people behind that was Prabhakar Raghavan.
And now, Prabhakar Raghavan is at Google. Where he has proceeded to make the same mistake, with the result that Google Search quality fell off of a cliff.
If Google had been acquired by Yahoo, he would have been in a position to destroy Google earlier than he actually did.
See https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ for more.
The HN discussion on that article has a lot of great commentary, including from some insiders: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
Google over the last 10 years or so (maybe even more) is a great example of the disruptor becoming the incumbent
Google search increased 22% from 2023 to 2024. You sure about that?
An increase in searches isn't necessarily a positive thing. Anecdotally, I've increased the number of Google searches I do simply because it now requires multiple attempts to frame my query in a way that provides the results I'm actually looking for!
But think of all the additional ads that uBlock origin is now hiding you could have seen :-D
Believe it or not, some of us don't use ad blockers. The ads are easy to ignore anyway when they're as irrelevant as the bad search results!
A decrease in search quality has damaged trust with the userbase, making crummy, unreliable data sources like LLMs seem much more viable.
Do you have any evidence to prove this?
Seems logical to me, but then my 71 year old mother with doctorates in both science and literature pulls out her phone and trusts Google AI results without thinking twice.
how much did internet usage increase that year, in terms of the number of people and hours spent? what changes happened in the app ecosystem that had google as a default search provider? what other service offerings shut down or degraded that caused people to move to google? how much did chrome browser usage increase over IE and Safari?
there are so many factors to this, its the same issue when target stock drops 10% over a year and people are like "oh it's because they stopped selling plus size bikinis! the crowd has spoken!". you can attribute it to anything but you're basically always wrong if you're not attributing it to at least a dozen different things
Yes, in fact I think that reinforces my point.
In the early 2000s Internet Explorer had 95% market share.
What do you do when you have a product whose value will inevitably drop in the medium/long-term? Squeeze every penny out of it while you still can. There is no solution to the SEO arms race, like there was no way Yahoo's blandly curated portal could stay relevant in the era of social media. He's the right man for the job. Google search has been doomed for a long time. It is another Yahoo.
LLMs have, for me at least, mostly replaced search. Because one of the most common things I search for is stuff like 'what is the function in [x] that does [y] in [z]'. Search for that on Google (or any other search engine) and your results will be complete trash. Search for it on an LLM and it's one of the few things they're nearly perfect at.
Search engines, especially with the resources of Google, could have developed at least basically functional natural language search decades ago. Instead they chose to rest on their laurels (pagerank even still plays a significant role!), and secure market control by anti-competitive behavior.
Google is certainly well on their way to becoming another Yahoo, but there's no extrinsic reason for it in the same way there was no reason for Yahoo to become what it became. In 100 years people will be searching the corpus of human writings (or whatever medium is dominant then) for information that's relevant to them. So there's in intrinsic reason for any search related company to just naturally die. It simply needs to keep innovating, or at least evolutionarily improving.
This is exactly why I use Kagi - I can easily use an integrated LLM by adding a "?" to my search or just get the results I want quickly and easily.
> Because one of the most common things I search for is stuff like 'what is the function in [x] that does [y] in [z]'.
This is also the type of search that Google makes no money from.
The money is in searching for up-to-date relevant product information, where Google is the undisputed leader.
>Search engines, especially with the resources of Google, could have developed at least basically functional natural language search decades ago
Google is one of the major AI research outfits, and arguably the only one that continues to deliver consistently over the last 2 decades. Statistical Machine Translation/Google Translate, Adwords Quality Score, TensorFlow, AlphaGo, Attention is all you need (Transformers), AlphaFold all Google innovations.
You can't really blame the prevalence of SEO slop on Google. It's not the lack of want of trying, it is hard technically (see how long it took to develop modern AI capabilities), expensive computationally (as we can see with the unsustainable cost of test-time search in ChatGPT) and in terms of user-experience.
>Google is certainly well on their way to becoming another Yahoo
Really, it isn't. Google is in the unique position of being the closest technology company to achieving full vertical integration of their value chain, from silicon to software to data to end-users. They are also at the forefront of frontier AI, including productising the research output. I don't really get the Google hate on HN, apart from maybe the YC/sama bias.
Your answer sounds very artificial. For instance "AI" is in no way whatsoever required for natural language search queries. There was some spreadsheet program back in the mid 90s that even supported natural language operation description - and is something that should also be obviously supported now a days. Even the adventure games of the same era often had natural language interfaces. It was quite useable even if obviously severely limited by minimal R&D put into it.
It was an obvious way to create a better user experience but instead search today is comparable to, if not worse than, search 20 years ago - because at least 20 years ago companies were ahead of the SEO guys, whereas that relationship has long since flipped.
What makes you think that Google hasn't developed natural language processing, when they launched Google Translate in 2006?
Also, what makes you think that NLP would solve the problem you're describing? Only LLMs has proven that it could fully understand and process the queries in the way you're describing, hence why I brought that up. However it is expensive computationally, and only recently was it even technically possible to do.
Most searches, even in natural language, are extremely simple. Google could certainly have added this functionality, but they chose not to. This is how old giants always die. They become so obsessed with further squeezing their users that they begin to stagnate, decline, and eventually completely miss the writing on the wall - and face disruption.
Translate is not what most people consider NLP.
Translation between languages and into logical representations is one of the main goals of NLP since the 1950s.
I will tell you all you need to know about Google - I was doing some research for a product I am building, my daughter (age 12) was an inspiration for what I am building and I asked her if she had time to help me with something and she did. Told her to “google ____” and she started laughing HARD and called me a boomer for suggesting she use Google… :)
Anecdotal evidence, not backed up by data. Actual data clearly shows that Google is the leading search engine across all age groups.
These aren't incompatible issues. Google has a monopoly maintained by excessive and illegal anti-competitive practices. The majority of users have no clue how to even change their default search engine, which Google actively exploits. Just checking it out - it took no less than 6 clicks into various specific menu and sub-menu settings to do so.
Poll only the subset of people that are actively aware of how to change their search engine and I suspect Google's dominance suddenly completely disappears. Remember, there was a time when Internet Explorer was the leading web browser across all age groups. Then Microsoft was forced to make it easier for people to change their default browser, and suddenly nobody was using IE anymore.
My apologies, I did not mean to imply that my kid's humour is evidence of Google's demise. But it does make you wonder a bit... we use Google out habit (they used to be decent) and also because they pay boatload of money to be default search on iphone and myriad of other reasons but younger generations do not have that intimate relationship with google and can see "with fresh eyes" its usefulness compared to the alternatives ...
> The money is in searching for up-to-date relevant product information, where Google is the undisputed leader.
Actually for products, a lot of people just go to Amazon has a thriving ad business.
> Google is one of the major AI research outfits, and arguably the only one that continues to deliver consistently over the last 2 decades. Statistical Machine Translation/Google Translate, Adwords Quality Score, TensorFlow, AlphaGo, Attention is all you need (Transformers), AlphaFold all Google innovations.
The problem with Google is that they can’t produce good profitable products. Innovation means nothing for a for profit company if it doesn’t make money.
>I don't really get the Google hate
Easy. Google is basically spyware. It's an advertising company, and their product is you.
>searching for up-to-date relevant product information
I realise I'm not a typical user, but I would never trust Google for any searches hinting that I'm looking to buy something, because the results are almost guaranteed to be inorganic. Someone will have paid Google money to be promoted for "best clothes dryer".
>Easy. Google is basically spyware. It's an advertising company, and their product is you.
This is such a flippant and facile response.
Google isn't a advertising company, it is a tech company that gets the majority of its revenue via selling advertising. This can change, and also likely to change in the next decade or so.
The reason things are is that nobody was willing to pay for search - it's a product with a very low incremental cost. The market dictated this operating model, and nobody has been able to upend this model so far, not even OAI. The numbers just don't work out. Do you think OAI can continue to subsidise free ChatGPT queries with paid ChatGPT Plus subscriptions? Almost certainly not.
I think actually people probably are willing to pay for search - Google just did such a damn good job for so long it made it impossible for a competitor to pop up
And now that their core product is getting worse I am paying for search
How else should someone take the statement 'that is the type of search that Google makes no money from' when someone explained what type of searches they do? If Google doesn't make money from it, they don't develop it for search apparently, which is why they haven't progressed in search beyond advertising. You can argue that it needs disrupting, but concluding that 'they make their money from advertising' when that was directly stated by you is not flippant or facile, it is deduction.
You can't eat your cake and still have it. If they refuse to develop an income stream that isn't related to advertising while using practices that use their dominant place in the market to buy other technologies or shut them down, then saying it isn't their fault that the revenue is only advertising is either disingenuous or naive.
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> In hindu mythology, Raghavan (also Ravana [1]), who was blessed by gods and turned into villain by abducting Sita from lord Ram.
WTH :D
Raghavan != Ravana
(Only relation is that they were on the opposite sides and that made pretty much the whole epic Ramayana)
Raghavan comes from "Raghu" (another name for Ram). Raghavan kinda means "from Raghu" or so like "His descendants" or so.
AFAIK
Yea this is just pure bs. If you had taken to search for the name, you'd have found the wiki explaining the name's origin. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raghavan
Also,Raghavan is most probably his father's name and Prabhakar will be his given name.
It's not unimaginable that a wonky google search or an AI summary led him to this.
It is fitting that GP's username is `findingMeaning`.
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> Are you just pulling this out of your ass?
Please edit swipes out of comments on HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
They never said he was there in those years or was involved in the failed acquisitions. Had Google been acquired then, yes, eventually Raghavan would have been calling the shots.
> In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo.
Having worked for Yahoo, I have to agree. Acquisitions were always seen in terms of "what can they do for the Yahoo brand?" and "How can we cut costs by migrating this to Yahoo tech?", not "How can we grow this business?". A Yahoo owned Facebook would have been suffocated like Tumblr and Flickr were.
So it would have been a net positive for society. :-)
Good guy Yahoo murdering companies that would have been net bad for society lol
> Yahoo owned Facebook would have been suffocated like Tumblr and Flickr were.
This is really the story for most acquisitions in tech. Interesting that Facebook was able to really do positive things with WhatsApp and Instagram.
Now I want a counter factual story about Yahoo acquiring Facebook, which then never flourishes into the influential network it became. What happens to society? Would we have the same political climate?
I feel like SOUTHLAND TALES, a movie written and shot before the iPhone was released, is quite helpful here. The movie emphasizes all of our post-9/11 failings in American culture at a time before Facebook or Twitter or any of the social media nonsense people blame the current awfulness on. The problems we face as Americans are far deeper than "cell phones" or "the Internet".
Those problems are American problems. They are human problems. You see them everywhere not just here.
I want to know this too! If I invent a time machine, I'll message you but till then here's my ungrounded take (Obviously everything here is my personal opinion and not evidenced)
The current political climate has mainly happened because capital interest has taken control of unregulated news and opinion. Meta are a particularly bad example of this, but as long as there's money to be made by providing a platform for polarising politics and fake news, then I think someone will do so.
Who knows, maybe in that alternate universe you'd be posting "if Yahoo hadn't made such savy choices, I wonder if we would have the political climate we have today?"
> The current political climate has mainly happened because capital interest has taken control of unregulated news and opinion
This has always been the case for as long as society has been consuming the news. “Business tycoons” have bought up newspapers and media outlets since forever to push their narrative.
I think one component that has changed is the sheer volume and diversity of media makes competition for your attention (clicks) all the more fierce. Enter The Algorithm and optimizing for metrics above all else.
I dunno. That doesn’t invalidate anything about the original question about what present day would be like without Facebook. Would something else similar have replaced it? Is Facebook really “the problem” or is it algorithmic content because algorithmicly driven content was going to happen facebook or not.
It wasn't that bad when we had the Fairness Doctrine, which was removed in 1987. From there you could see a steady slide in US politics as polarization increased, from the Clinton scandal, to Gingrich and then Bush 2000. By the time Facebook hit it was already too late.
The Fairness Doctrine had a very limited influence on the media in general. It's power has been vastly over stated as of the last 15 years.
It was only applicable to broadcast media, and rarely enforced. Nearly all of the enforcement was on behalf of private individuals wanting free airtime to respond to negative new stories about them.
In my opinion it's a very bad idea to want political appointees to decide when an issue hasn't been given fair news coverage. The very idea that there is only 2 sides to an issue reinforces the two party system that has made media so biased in the first place
It's because of the fragmentation of news sources that can now be customized to one's preference with any finely sliced political cant desired. Three television networks maintained a measure of neutrality in their reporting. Mainstream print media did too albeit to a lesser extent. Wackjobs had a hard time finding each other to form a tribe that would destabilize society.
Before the rise of social media, the mainstream news ignored both things going on in minority communities like police violence and ignored rural America. The MAGA community and Trump himself bypassed the mainstream media because of social media.
America has always been polarized - institutions just never gave them a voice.
> The current political climate has mainly happened because capital interest has taken control of unregulated news and opinion.
We're seeing the opposite, though. As the traditional media companies declined and the masses gained a greater ability to voice their own views, polarization increased.
As someone who tries to avoid the news and politics, it's pretty easy to avoid the companies selling them. But I keep running into them because there are lots of users on Hacker News/Reddit/etc. who try to interject it into every discussion they can . Invariably, these people don't come at it from the point of view that they might be wrong and the other side might be right; they act like zealous crusaders on a mission to vanquish evil.
So polarization wasn’t an issue when segregation was the law in much of the south with separate schools, water fountains, entrances?
I don't dissagree, but I think I'm using "news and opinion" more loosely. To my mind, facebook putting your sister's political rant into your feed above your uncle's fishing pictures, is a kind of wauly of profiting from devisive political opinion. Even if it is more subtle than the NYT publishing a think piece.
> the masses gained a greater ability to voice their own views, polarization increased.
It is the bot farms voicing opinions IMO. For regular people one account equals one human, and it is a difficult feeling to uproot for many people.
Yes because before the current media landscape, politicians didn’t win elections by using dog whistles (Willie Horton), making some out group the villain or “segregation now. Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever”.
Why are people acting like this is ancient history when my still living parents grew up in the segregated south and as recently as 2014 there were cities that still had segregated proms?
This happened in 1985
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WErjPmFulQ0
This is no media exaggeration. Forsyth county was notorious for this until the early 2000s. I (a Black guy) had a house built here in 2016 and sold it just last year when I relocated. While my son was one of the five Black guys in his entire school, we never experienced any issues so I don’t want to cast any aspersions toward Forsyth as it exist today.
Poul Anderson [1] in its short stories Time Patrol has this theory that the past can be disturbed to some extend, some things have to happen independently of particular individuals or events.
As a let down as it is for readers interested in how the author handles and solves time paradoxes (it is better than the insipid and sloppy multiverse solution, though) - Time Patrol are mostly history-focused action stories - this theory makes sense to me. At some point the world gets "ready" to discover things because all the pieces of the puzzle are in its hands. In the case of Facebook, I believe it is not an accident or "because Zuckerberg"; a massive social network had to emerge, in particular due to network effects.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poul_Anderson
> then I think someone will do so.
Yes, but, would they be any where near the level of what FB achieved? Take Truth Social as an example. It started because people wanted a place they get out of the larger group to dedicate to like minded. In this Philip K Dick style rewriting of history where FB was created by those behind Truth, would it have ever achieved critical mass?
Just because someone else attempts to fill in the vacuum of something else not being there does not mean that it will succeed in filling the void. Truth only survives on the cult of personality, not because people really want to be using it or because it's like a good product
> Take Truth Social as an example. It started because people wanted a place they get out of the larger group to dedicate to like minded.
Not at all. It started because Trump was banned from Twitter. That’s it. The whole point was to give Trump a platform. There is nothing organic or natural about Truth Social and if it is the symptom of anything, it’s that some people just have too much money.
I kind of disagree in that the giving him a platform is just the cover for the actual purpose which is a way for anyone to shovel him money through a "legitimate" means to avoid any sense of bribe or quid pro quo. Very similar into how certain countries that wanted to curry favor made long term rental agreements for property owned by Trump. It was only slightly less obvious than dropping of bags in the oval office with $ marked on them.
Indeed. Good point.
easy, man. there was another site called myspace back then. they would have won the game and the end result would have been nearly the same or worse.
Haha what? It’s the literal opposite mate. We’ve had an explosion of independent and non-capital aligned media. No matter what your brand of crazy is, you can find the “thought leaders” and community for you.
There's another comment along these lines too. I think my "news and opinion" phrase sounded like I exclusively meant mainstream news. But I was thinking more generally abouts "news and opinion content" like Breitbart, X comments, facebook rants, etc.
Yeah the explosion of the internet has allowed some conspiracy schizo person in the US to connect with another schizo conspriacy person across the world in Moldova to quickly find each other online and then confirm each others schizo beliefs.
Believe in flat Earth? Are you a holocaust denier? Think the moon landing is fake? Is the government gang stalking you? Welp you are in luck, there's thousands of other people just like you and here is a forum.
Kinda wild when you think about it.
Do you feel the urge to fuck your toaster?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25667362
> unregulated news
For all of unregulated news's flaws, government controlled news would be worse.
Yes, probably. But there's a spectrum. The UK has quite strict rules on air time to differing views (you can't air a climate change story which presents climate denial as the only opinion as news). I think those rules lead to a better system, not a more government controlled one.
Ironically, we (the UK) have the BBC which is fairly literally, government funded (not controlled) news. It's much more even handed than a lot of commercial news.
Britain's political culture is a bit of a disaster though. Kier Starmer was the best they could find in the last election and as far as I can tell even the people who voted for him don't seem to support him in the main. This time last century they controlled 20% of the worlds population and sat in a vast network of trade and technological innovation all feeding back towards the British Isles.
Then through basically an ongoing refusal to engage with political realities they've managed to transition to the number 5 and dropping economy in nominal terms and, realistically, probably don't have the industrial oomph to back up the paper numbers. There was political debate recently over whether the country should even be able to produce steel. Per capita the picture is a bit worse, and on a PPP basis they're actually a hair below the European average. They've also managed to become relatively politically isolated because no view seems to have gained ascendancy over what their foreign policy should look like.
Now it'd be unfair to blame it all on the present crop given the huge amounts of damage done in WWII, but it is a bit difficult for me to accept the trendlines of the UK compared to the recovering USSR countries or China/Taiwan while believing that there is a healthy political discourse. The high performing countries have done amazing things even from a standing start in the 70s, 80s and 90s. From such a dominant starting position, with the momentum of the old empire and technically being on the winning side of pretty much every major conflict and ideological UK politics seem to have done rather badly. The country is wildly average for somewhere that was so ahead of the game relatively recently and with so many opportunities to succeed in the interim and such poor quality of candidates allowed to hold power.
We would have had something else with same effect. The age was ripe with social media, orkut, Facebook, MySpace, and so many others I cannot even remember.
That’s my thought.
One analogy is local news media ecosystems across the US, which have generally looked pretty similar though not 100% identical over the past ~125 years or so, suggesting some determinism based on broader culture and technology.
If Facebook had stumbled, something else would have gotten the next microgeneration of college students and then their parents and grandparents.
It’s possible to me that an independent Instagram would have filled Facebook’s niche a few years later, and something like Snapchat would have taken the current Instagram niche. Maybe Twitter would have played a different role.
It’s also possible a web 2.0 answer to classmates.com would have grabbed the older crowd, and we’d have a slightly more profound age split.
But ultimately I think we’d end up where we are — a set of platforms algorithmically curating feeds of user-generated content — with a few cosmetic differences.
I think something roughly Facebook-shaped was inevitable.
Before Facebook there was Myspace and Orkut (which was huge in Brazil) - things were definitely pointed that direction.
Facebook's hook was that at first it was only at certain colleges, and then it expanded but I think you still needed an invite to join. In the early days it wasn't full of high schoolers and junior high kids like MySpace was. Facebook really used exclusivity and FOMO to drive viral growth.
Facebook is pretty bad for society, but Twitter has also been quite bad. IMO Twitter has always been the real problem. Facebook replaced Email as the channel of choice for your weird relatives to spread conspiracy theories. And that is bad, but it is just an enhancement of a constant thing.
Twitter: all the journalists and elected officials signed up and decided the stuff that went on there Mattered and was News. The shitposts that showed up in their feed became social trends.
It is a widespread failure, but if we had to pick a thread that we should call the start of that part of the unraveling, I’d point at Twitter. I mean, that’s just the social media bit. Social media didn’t cause, like, Afghanistan or whatever.
Yeah, all social media has been pretty toxic for society. But Twitter has been especially bad. Turns out that requiring everyone to use very short messages means that interactions devolve into short, hot takes almost immediately. And then people just get angrier and angrier at each other as they fight back and forth via those barbs. Twitter couldn't have done more to unravel the social fabric if they actively tried to.
I think if bay area companies had behaved differently in early treatment of Facebook I don't think we would have ended up with such a paranoid/aggressive Facebook and things would have been much better, even if Facebook still became super successful. I think some of those early purchase attempts/behaviors are WHAT made Facebook the bad thing it became. Wonder if the juicy stories ever come out.
> What happens to society? Would we have the same political climate?
A different MySpace clone takes over the same niche.
No it would just be a bunch of happy people messaging each other on Yahoo Messenger. We were never meant to see the inside of the brain of the average human put on public display.
I think so. Social networking was the AI of that era.
> Would we have the same political climate?
that's exactly where my thoughts went
Yahoo could have been society’s loss leader.
Inclined because, for example, Viaweb didn't become Shopify.
Tumblr, del.icio.us, ROI. Probably all should have continued growing and becoming established properties.
Delicious was the only useful bookmark manager ever. Nothing ever came close to replacing it. Though for me the “social” part was pretty useless (plenty of actual link aggregators out there to discover content at the time)
…god remember the “tags” phase of content organization?
Delicious was cool because of the constant streaming of links and things that I was able to discover back then. I would sit there and just click on links, finding good content
What's the superior phase of content organization now?
For me it was always: Google, YouTube, Reddit and forums. There are also niche sites that cater to certain groups and interests like Steam and Twitch for gaming or IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes for movies. There is no universal content discovery platform or engine(besides maybe Google).
LLMs.
Flickr was the Instagram of it's era. It could have maintained that crown if Yahoo gave half a duck about it
Flickr and Instagram were pretty different.
Flickr incentivized uploading a lot of photos with metadata and was highly searchable. It was great for photo hobbyists building a personal archive for others to peruse.
Instagram was for smartphone photos and playing with filters to set a vibe, and ephemeral sharing with friends and people you wanted to impress. It’s hardly searchable at all.
It sounds like an Instagram style app, with Flickr as the backend would be ideal. People could still share for fun from their phones, while actually being able to find and organize old photos, if they wish.
You can do something like that but it must be an Open Web project. Walled gardens only care about themselves and their ad revenue.
>Inclined because, for example, Viaweb didn't become Shopify
Who cares, it gave Paul Graham money for the Y Combinator.
Exactly. If Yahoo was capable of nurturing Google into what it became, it was also capable of simply becoming that first. But it didn’t, because it wasn’t run by the same people who ran Google.
And I’m not saying that only Page and Brin were the only ones who could have made Google, only that they clearly were two people who were capable of doing it. However, Yahoo was not run by such people. So Yahoo would have bought Google and would have made Google conform to Yahoo’s culture, probably relegating Page and Brin to lesser roles where they couldn’t drive company culture.
I used to joke that Yahoo were benevolent time travelers from the future, sworn to stop companies that would become threats to humanity.
They would stop the company by buying it.
Because Yahoo buying a company kills the company.
If only Yahoo hadn't run out of money before... (certain companies that are now too powerful and ruthless to be called out safely).
> In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo.
Yeah exactly. Also I would consider the Overture acquisition extremely successful because their patent lawsuit v. Google gave them 8% of Google pre-IPO. If held (which it was not), that is a substantial asset today.
You are spot on, but you are drawing a slightly wrong conclusion, IMHO:
Yes, Overture what the best Yahoo! acquisition ever made.
But Yahoo!'s greatest mistake was to settle the Google lawsuit for a few million dollars - which meant that Google could keep using Overture's (parented) invention of keyword bidding based advertising; without it, Google may never have found a way to become profitable.
So Yahoo! bought its own gravestone for $50m, when all they would have had to do is stand firm and go to trial. If Y! exercised its government-awarded monopoly rights for keyword auction based advertising, there may still be that Y! portal that was so prominent in the early 2000s.
PS: Yahoo Inc. is not full gone - Yahoo Japan remains the last independent part of the former Y! - see https://www.yahoo.co.jp .
> Yahoo Japan remains the last independent part of the former Y!
didn't they get bought by the koreans
well then Yahoo Korea is the last part /s
They had 8% of Google at one point and sold it?!
"Facebook’s board would have forced Zuckerberg to take it"
Doesn't Zuckerberg have majority control?
Sure; but (IIRC) at the time Facebook was burning cash and the board could have threatened future funding if he refused the offer. He may have been able to get more funding anyway but the larger point is these things are never as simple as the legal docs might imply.
Yup It is power dynamics always, legal documents only matter in court.
At the time in 2006 there were plenty of competing networks and any one of them could have climbed to the top.
Facebook wasn’t unique tech wise by all accounts one huge 20k line main file not like Google with PageRank or pegs viaweb written in Lisp or Amazon with early aspects of AWS.
FB could have been replicated and with right money scaled by anyone else , the challenge was there were series of spectacular growth and failures in the social network space
The tech innovations started first with Hack as a PHP compatible language couple of years later then things like relay , graphQL, react and so on.
Where I live, the early Facebook apps were the killer feature of the early days of Facebook.
Genuinely asking, what other software company did something like this back then? I'm tempted to say (tounge in cheek) FB was the original PaaS, but maybe im not old enough
Flash Apps hosting which was Facebook did then was not ground breaking at all, There were many other competing flash hosting sites .
The killer thing others couldn’t do Facebook did was make available social APIs for the app developers to integrate into their platform to make the apps viral, which benefited both them and Facebook.
OG PaaS in the Web 2.0 age IMO was the google app engine , it predated all AWS offerings and gave an actual application runtime .
Recall that Kalanick had majority control at the time that he was ousted.
Travis Kalanick of vibe-physics near-breakthroughs fame?
Ha! I don’t listen to the All In podcast, but I did see this:
https://youtu.be/TMoz3gSXBcY
> In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo.
True, but they also wouldn't have developed into companies reducing Yahoo's reach ..
In 2008:
https://news.microsoft.com/source/2008/02/01/microsoft-propo...
So for about $44 billion.
I had read the news at the time on multiple channels.
They didn't take the offer.
The follow-up after Jerry Yang initially refused Ballmer: somehow Jerry had a come-to-Jesus moment and decided to sell but by then Ballmer changed his mind. Jerry even chased Ballmer on a golf course trying to sell but to no avail.
https://www.businessinsider.com/2008/5/jerry-and-steve-playe...
Wasnt that deal pricing whole of Yahoo as worth minus billion dollars with Alibaba stock the only valuable thing in the package?
Could be. I don't remember.
It is an interesting thought experiment. Would Yahoo have become Google, or would another company have taken Google's place, or perhaps something entirely different would have played out. Would we have had Android? Would we have had Chrome, or Google Maps, and so on
> Had Yahoo increased its offer by just $100 million, Facebook’s board would have forced Zuckerberg to take it.
Is that true?
Zuck still controls 57% of all voting shares and that’s today, yearly 20-years later.
How could the Board force him to sell to Yahoo.
https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/zuckerberg-motivates-s...
The board is in control of any company. Having the controlling votes means being able to reappoint the board but would have to do so by following the company's constitution which may take some time. For example, some companies only allow reappointing board members at certain times of the year.
I'm still not seeing any mechanism by which they could force him to sell, though. Even if the board fired him and he couldn't replace the board right away due to the corporate constitution, how are they going to force him to sell his shares if he doesn't want to?
Shareholders of companies are "along for the ride" and simply participate in the decisions of the board. In theory if they fired Zuck and appointed a interim CEO and directed that the company get sold, then it could have happened and Zuck would just be allocated his percentage of the value paid by Yahoo.
In practice I would guess there would be lawsuits filed immediately to hold up any such activity until he had time to exert control of the board, but it would have been interesting nonetheless.
So you're saying that in principle, the board could have forced Zuckerberg to sell his shares even if he didn't want to? It seems like it should be wildly illegal to forcibly deprive someone of their property like that.
I don’t think that’s entirely accurate.
Isn’t the Board supposed to act in the best interest of the shareholders?
And if one person holds a majority of shares, wouldn’t that mean the Board is effectively acting based on that individual’s direction?
The board is supposed to act in the interest of _all_ shareholders, not just majority or controlling. Meaning, a group of minority shareholders could sue for discrimination as happened at Tesla recently.
Also, I’m not sure of the ownership structure, but he may own 57% of voting stock but a minority of non voting stock, and the non-voting members may have certain rights irrespective of voting rights. I’d be shocked if they didn’t negotiate some kind of escape hatch.
Why have a board then? Just let the shareholders vote directly on corporate decisions.
Yea, I'm really confused on this.
Someone who understands it well should explain please.
Like the Astronomer CEO that was forced to resign, could the sane thing happen to Zuckerberg in similar circumstances since he has majority share?
What If it was something entirely different, could they force him out? I don't understand it.
Wondering the same, would love if someone could explain it. Hypothetically if Founder / CEO have 100% voting rights and all current public shares have non-voting right, the board could still fire the CEO?
i.e The only way to prevent this from happening would be to stay private?
After those companies didn’t sell to Yahoo, they went on to develop new things, which led to growth. If Yahoo has bought them, they’d just let them get old and fade away, eventually shutting them down… or at best keeping them around with minimal maintenance. Yahoo is where once great sites go to die.
The story also mentioned Yahoo!'s best investment: Alibaba. What was different was Yahoo! was just an investor, not a buyer.
I guess the question is how many other companies did they correctly identify as not being trillion dollar companies. They will be optimizing for different things than VCs. Also, it is very possible they would have run one or both into the ground, making them bad investments anyways. We like to dunk on Yahoo with our perfect hindsight, but they were probably reasonable decisions at the time. So yes I agree with this comment.
The truth is that bad leadership and no clear vision led to Yahoo's decline. They went through over half a dozen CEOs in a short span and each had a different strategy.
They failed to buy Google and Facebook, instead they bought GeoCities, Tumblr, and Broadcast for billions and ran them into the ground.
I was on geocities and tumblr for a while, long back.
I never liked Tumblr.
there is neocities now.
what was broadcast about?
Broadcast = An early version of Spotify, Netflix and YouTube
Thanks.
> In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo.
Having lived through several acquisitions - both as a founder exiting and as an employee being acquired/acquiring...
Very rarely does the acquirer have the vision to see when the acquired company has a better long term trajectory. The CEO who does the deal might, but the senior management team and line managers usually just intentionally and unintentionally rob the acquired company of resources (cash, people, marketing, facilities) and then the exodus of smart people begins. It takes a very special team to make acquisitions actually add up to 1+1=4 most are lucky to get 1+1=0.5.
> In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo.
People also like to point to how foolish of Blockbuster it was not to buy Netflix when they had the opportunity to, but I’m also inclined to believe that the merged companies would never have made the decisive moves involving streaming video and content production. It’s tempting to say that Amazon would have filled in the streaming video gap (although perhaps late enough for feature film and TV piracy to proliferate a little further into the mainstream), but I wonder whether Apple would have adapted its iTunes service into Apple TV first. (Another dark horse I like to think about here would be RealMedia which may have identified a niche.)
I'm inclined to agree.
I'm ambivalent as to how they became trillion-dollar behemoths, but I think that Yahoo would have strangled them in the crib; possibly, deliberately.
I've seen exactly that kind of thing happen, before.
There is no strong method for predicting the future. Acquired/could have acquired in particular doesn't have predictive ability.
"Acquiring" is meaningless. Even "plans for the company after the acquisition" is meaningless. Credible reports of motivations that would lead the acquiring company to take a hands off approach to the company acquired means at least a little bit, having now seen companies taking that approach not immediately killing the golden goose.
I'm still sad Yahoo shut down Astrid [0] after acquisition - my personal intersection with the many, many small companies they acquired and shuttered.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrid_(application)
> Yahoo! acquired the company on May 1, 2013 and shuttered the Astrid service on August 5, 2013.
Ouch! That's pretty awful.
And yahoo! leadership agreed. They probably intended to just bury the tech and keep some staff which is why they didn’t pay the asking price. Had they thought either of these properties were transformational they’d have paid.
It is saddening to know how close we were to no Facebook and Google. Butterfly effect...
Do you think any of their other successful acquisitions had the same potential if left on their own?
Tumblr was 2-3x bigger than reddit apparently at acquisition time (just looking at google trends). Now reddit is public at 27B market cap, and tumblr is virtually worthless. I don't think there's anything fundamental about tumblr that would have prevented it from being the one in the sun instead. They're not dissimilar, and they could've used those years to grow tumblr in whatever direction they liked if there was indeed something stalling it.
I know a fair bit about this deal. Some massive percentage of Tumblr's traffic was porn. And, shockingly, Yahoo management did NOT know this when they signed the check.
Or even, did any of the other successful acquisitions have potential that was perceptibly curtailed by said acquisition?
Feels like a cliche at this point, but I’m not sure it’s true.
> Facebook’s board would have forced Zuckerberg to take it.
Then what's that Zuck always having >= 51% votes since the beginning?
He did at the very beginning, but lost it because of dilution and then gained it back as FB became bigger and he could play investors off one another.
And maybe the world would be a better place? We'll never know.
Hindsight is 20/20.
How successful were the six companies they aquired?
I do miss them being one of the biggest FreeBSD contributors. For a long time in the late 90s / early 2000s Yahoo was to FreeBSD what Netflix is now (and maybe a bit more). They used to host a lot of the FreeBSD build/test infrastructure and employed several src committers and they contributed heavily to a LOT of work that has made FreeBSD a viable OS going forward.
For example, they contributed heavily to the SMPng project (which made FreeBSD into a modern, multi-theaded kernel with fine grained locking). They even hosted the kickoff meeting: https://people.freebsd.org/~fsmp/SMP/SMPmeeting.html They employed Peter Wemm, who did the majority of the work for the AMD64 (eg, x86-64) port. And lots that I'm forgetting about probably..
>Yahoo was to FreeBSD what Netflix is now
Many of the Netflix engineers a decade ago, especially the ones that contribute to FreeBSD, are ex-Yahoo.
Yahoo was dying when Netflix was growing, and a couple of the best engineering leaders from Yahoo came over to Netflix and brought all the top talent with them, and they gave them the freedom to innovate.
I've been there, working on FreeBSD performance since 2015. I wouldn't say "many" of the early folks. From memory, I think it was more like 2. Granted, 2 of the earliest. More of the early folks were ex Level3.
That was in the openconnect team but we had a lot of ex-Yahoo throughout engineering. For example the entire observability team was ex-Yahoo when I got there in 2011.
What happened? Did they stop using FreeBSD? Did they continue to use it but jsut stop contributing?
Yes, we migrated over to Linux for a number of reasons, among them 1/higher developer mindshare, and 2/Linux had better SMP performance for the first decade or so vs. FreeBSD as we started to buy beefier multi-core and multi-socket servers.
I thought it was Marisa Meyer that forced the change?
No, this process began long before she joined the company.
Sigh. I often think an erosion of tech stack also brings erosion of company culture and value.
Having worked at both Yahoo and Amazon, I don't think that's necessarily true. Amazon has a strong culture that's reflected in our Leadership Principles and has survived multiple significant tech stack changes over its history. Yahoo was never quite so principled as much as it was quirky and fun.
Hadoop too
An underreported part of the Yahoo story is its relationship to India. I worked there during the Verizon years and heard the history. Yahoo was a forerunner of the "offshoring" of technology jobs to India. It moved lots of core operations to a small army of engineers there. They figured out that their American counterparts made substantially more money than they did, especially the middle managers. Waves of Indian employees began moving to Santa Clara and getting market rate wages. Suddenly, Yahoo wasn't saving as much money as they used to. I don't think it was a major factor in its overall financial decline, but it had some effect I'm sure. On a side note, I heard a couple of Indian engineers say they were moving back to raise their kids because they didn't like the cultural influences in our schools. There were many interesting lunchtime conversations about things like that.
> On a side note, I heard a couple of Indian engineers say they were moving back to raise their kids because they didn't like the cultural influences in our school
They didn't like the cultural influences by a culture which advanced their life prosperity so they relocate their children back to the culture where they will have to learn everything again by themselves.
I think the issue was the people running it were the type of people who are taught to ruthlessly look at a spreadsheet and decide if Coca Cola can invest X in marketing and product development they can expect to get Y back (with reasonable accuracy). Of course with software small teams can do big things so these calculations are almost impossible.
Investing a billion dollars in your search engine in ~2008 might be considered insane of course. We were told by Carol Bartz at an all hands that they had done the work on their spreadsheets and they could not compete with the investment Microsoft and Google were planning. It still annoys me to this day that there was no discussion or attempt to decide if the engineers and the company were up for the challenge with Google, even with less money. I'm not saying Yahoo! would have won, but to not even have bothered trying still irritates me - where is your vision? where is your fight?
Anyway this is my take on it, the management decided to just give up on being technically excellent and even being a software company at some point. The mind boggles why you would do this while software was eating the world and you had loads of fantastic engineering talent...
It was only just over a decade ago I used to play lots of the online games hosted on Yahoo and it was great! I had just started dating my (now) wife and we used to hang out every evening in an online video conference and play online versions of Pool, Risk etc, and as it was all inside Yahoo's ecosystem we only had to login once and we could automatically play each other.
Going further back, Yahoo's web directory was also a good and fun way to explore the world wide web. When Google appeared, and its search was so good, the concept of "people don't need bookmarks any more" seemed to spread, but in the process the joy of discovery was lost. Rather like how browsing DVDs in Blockbuster means you could find something really cool by accident, but searching a database means you have to have an idea what you want to find to begin with.
As a ex-Yahoo! from 20 years ago, I have a very clear opinion about the downfall of the company: Yahoo! had spent years structuring itself as a "media" company - not a technology company - but nonsensically, it also wanted to be Google. Yes, Yahoo! had parts of the company that were extremely technologically advanced, but they hired Hollywood execs and MBAs to run the company through the 2000s - people who had no real technological vision at all.
Yahoo!'s greatest strength and primary role in the Internet could be summarized as this: It was the most useful site on the web. Users relied on it for their start page, email, finance, weather, news, sports, maps, casual multiplayer games, forums, instant messaging, answers, fantasy sports, evites, photos, and an amazing amount of search traffic. It was a one-stop shop for everything you needed online. Maybe not the best in every area, but always pretty good.
You know how Google starts and kills products constantly? Yahoo! rarely did that. It saw interesting business models, copied them or bought into them and kept them going and users loved them for it.
And all of this was profitable, just not Google-level profits. Remember Jack Welch's mantra of GE not having to be number one in every market as long as they were number two or three and were profitable? At one point, this was Yahoo! and they could have remained relevant to this day had they embraced this role.
But the company's divisions were siloed and competed against each other in a way that makes Microsoft machiavellianism seem like a Sunday picnic. And the leadership was obsessed with Google and wanted to outdo them, even though they had a completely different culture and mindset. It was never going to happen. Regardless, they ignored Yahoo!'s bread and butter services, confused their employees and customers, and generally ran the company into the ground.
Yahoo! needed strong leadership that understood the company's strengths and built on them to continue to be useful to web users. Sadly, that never happened.
I remember in the late 90's switching from yahoo to google because google's search results were better. I also set my homepage to google because the homepage was so fast to load, it wasn't all cluttered up like the yahoo homepage.
I remember when I saw google for the first time, it was while searching for stuff on the redhat website, and I saw the Gooooogle at the bottom. I guess google had indexed the website for them. That led me to check out the google web site itself.
I think at some point that google was indexing the web for yahoo, I could be wrong though.
Besides HN, Yahoo is still my only other news portal. (Yes, I am that old.)
Whenever Yahoo! comes into discussion, no one talks about the other side of Marissa Mayer, the former CEO who fucked up Yahoo so bad. I had a friend back then who used to tell me how toxic the work culture had become in there. She apparently openly hated men and discriminated against them in the name of empowerment (and subsequently lawsuits were even filed). She was a glorified senior manager from Google basically who had no idea how to run a company. The Tumblr acquisition was proof. Most of the employees had lost faith in her after that acquistion basically. She, on the other hand, took away millions home while everyone who had invested their sweat equity and trusted her even one bit got screwed royally.
I don't know the finer details of that, but weren't they already travelling towards obscurity by the time she arrived?
Yahoo was a defacto entry point into the wider web and as Google gained popularity I think the average web savviness of people meant people had less reasons to arrive at Yahoo. Having a search deal with Google at least guaranteed their relevance for a while.
As a Y! employee for a couple of years - although my time was brief, I can say with confidence that had Yahoo successfully acquired Google or Facebook, both would have been destroyed in short order.
Yes, but that just makes me wish it had happened...
Wish they’d been bought by MS, probably would have sidelined them. Was a really bad deal from memory.
Nobody can beat Yahoo in making bad deals. Lets not forget they made Mark Cuban a billionaire with a legendary Broadcast.com acquisition at $10K per user! $5.7 billion dollars written off in less than two years.
Yahoo was structured wrong from day 1 to ever be great. At the core, it was a company with an unremarkable product that quickly became irrelevant as search engines took over. A directory of the internet was the naive kind of thing that required little skill or vision. That's what Jerry Wang built. That's what Yahoo was. Good idea at the time. Well executed. But not exactly rocket science. And it had a short shelf life and was soon forgotten.
But it had money courtesy of lots of pre-dot com bubble stupid money that investors were flinging around. So it bought things that others had built to grow. And for a while that worked.
It had more resources and toys than Google. But over time Google outperformed them on essentially everything it bothered doing. Better search engine, better mail, better news, better video (twice because Google Video was better than Yahoo Video before Youtube dethroned it), etc. These are all areas where Yahoo belatedly tried to gain ground through acquisitions and failed; over and over again. They always came in second or third with essentially anything they touched or tried.
By the time Marissa Mayer (ex Google) came in, Google had already won and Yahoo was this big stupid conglomerate of many things that were kind of alright individually but clearly never going to add up to Google. And the rest is history. Marissa Mayer flailed for a few years. There were more acquisitions and a few flopped projects ran by her personally. None of it mattered.
In the process, they ran Flickr into the ground. They ran Tumblr into the ground. Etc. They built a well deserved reputation of poor stewards of great stuff that landed in their laps. What they bought was quality. But they couldn't maintain that quality or nurture it.
Yahoo is a great story how all the money in the world can't make you a great company if you start out being a mediocre also-ran. If you are running blind, because you have no vision, deals like Google and Facebook will woosh right by you. That's what happened. And arguably, it wouldn't have mattered, because they'd likely have screwed those companies up as well.
A human-curated directory of the good parts of internet would be worth it's servers weight in gold today.
Combine with modern perplexity-style answer engine and it would be far away from "also ran".
Yahoo! had 99 problems, but human curation wasn't one.
And I'm sure if Yahoo was still around, they'd be trying that. And failing again.
I am still a Yahoo! pinger as well.
Shortest, fastest?
What do you mean by "safest"? How is pinging 1.0.0.1 safer that yahoo.com? With pinging 1.1 you exclude DNS from your chain, but is that safer anyhow?
You mis-read me. I said 'shortest'.
I just tried, pinging Yahoo is about 20 times slower than pinging Google...
I decided to run a small experiment
ping -c 20 -i 5 google.com; ping -c 20 -i 5 yahoo.com [snip] --- google.com ping statistics --- 20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 14.746/19.939/25.057/3.153 ms [snip] --- yahoo.com ping statistics --- 20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 14.561/20.883/25.080/2.675 ms
They look comparable to me?
It would depend on where you are pinging from and if they have anything closer to you to respond.
From where I am, google averages 4ms, yahoo is at 200ms+. Obviously because they dont have the money or marketshare to bother putting anything for me to route closer too.
Same experiment from my gigabit link in Silicon Valley. Looks like Yahoo is about 3 times slower but far more consistent
--- google.com ping statistics ---
20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 6.918/23.419/294.037/62.272 ms
--- yahoo.com ping statistics ---
20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 78.056/78.940/80.940/0.811 ms
Although what's interesting is that Yahoo is really more like 10 times slower (almost every ping was in the 6-8ms range), it's just that there was just that one packet at 300ms and other at 30ms that really blew out the average.
It's a muscle memory now after 30 years of doing it. Always the first thing I ping when testing a connection.
Another football in the Verizon Yahoo/Shuffle are those Verizon customers who were sold to Frontier but had verizon.net email addresses.
Verizon kept control of those lightly-maintained email accounts and pushed them into the Yahoo/AOL infrastructure. Users with a verizon.net email address had webmail access at mail.aol.com.
Verizon didn't make life easy. They changed POP/IMAP/SMTP servers every year or so. Just this May they changed again, from smtp.mail.yahoo.com to smtp.verizon.net - but the old servers still worked until the AOL outage 2 days ago.
During the years in between, customers got caught between AOL's mandate to use OAuth and Microsoft's refusal to support it in Outlook.
FF to now-ish and Verizon is purchasing those same FiOS customers back again. One more smack with the Verizon ping-ping paddle.
> but the old servers still worked until the AOL outage 2 days ago.
So that explains why my dad's email suddenly couldn't send outgoing messages (the configuration, for years, was outgoing.yahoo.verizon.net with normal password). After what felt like an hour, what worked was changing it to smtp.mail.yahoo.com and using OAuth.
It has caused no end of trouble for older folks who are still using yahoo.com and aol.com and sbcglobal email addresses who can't get any sort of sane support and are having a nightmare time getting into their email accounts that are linked to everything they've signed up for in the last 30 years.
Customers who had sbcglobal and att email addresses ended up using Yahoo for email, which I always found ironic.
People blaming the acquisition failure by/from Yahoo for the downfall are misinformed.
The reason for Yahoo's failure was its loss of dominance in search to the Chrome Browser.
Google's few actions made Google what it is today, and that starts with a few most critical:
- Launch of browser ( Chrome browser ). It didn't even become a meme against Internet Explorer, but also defeated Mozilla Firefox in its own game.
- Acquisition of YouTube.
- Acquisition of Android.
They are already doing other crazy innovation that makes them dominate the Industry.
While Yahoo was only famous for
- Yahoo Answers ( Quora took over that ),
- Yahoo Mail ( Gmail took over that ),
- Yahoo Chat ( the golden days ), and this one - Yahoo failed to capitalise with the change of ERA, WhatsApp would have never succeeded, if Yahoo had innovated its chat and entered the Mobile app segment.
> The reason for Yahoo's failure was its loss of dominance in search to the Chrome Browser.
I'm afraid your timeline might be a bit off there.
Yahoo outsourced their search to Google in 2000 [1] while google didn't buy android until ~2005 and chrome didn't come out until ~2008 [2]. And before google, yahoo had outsourced to 'Inktomi' and before that IIRC to 'Altavista'
Yahoo wasn't even trying to compete in search. This was the era of companies like "AOL Time Warner" where people thought web portals were media companies, and company bosses spooked by the dot-com crash were trying to diversify into tangible assets.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2000/06/yahoo-goes-gaga-for-google/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome
> And before google, yahoo had outsourced to 'Inktomi' and before that IIRC to 'Altavista'
> Yahoo wasn't even trying to compete in search.
Yeah. This is a common MBA-ism: focus on the top of the value chain where the largest margin exists.
The theory itself is actually not wrong, TBH; it's just that Yahoo misidentified where the top of the value chain lay. They thought the top of the value chain was the users, and that sponsered content was the product. Google correctly identified the users as the product and the advertisers as the top of the value chain.
IOW, Yahoo sold curated content (product) to users (customers). Google sold users (product) to the advertisers (customers). To Yahoo, the people visiting their site was the top of the value chain if you're directly pitching products to those users!
You made up a lot of history here. I hope the AIs watching don't train on this nonsense
I was searching on Google and the AI result was "According to Hacker News" then gave a huge result from the comments. Google is doing their best to disrupt themselves before someone else does.
Yahoo literally did every wrong move and turned every move that could make it become successful again down, almost as if it deliberate. I can't believe it still exists.
I do not think it was just the bad acquisitions.
Yahoo also turned from a tech company into a media company. At some point, every decision was made with a media company mindset.
This includes making decisions that prioritize short-term revenue over building growth loops or enhancing user retention.
Also, no investments into technology. Browser, CDN, proper web hosting, cloud - they missed everything.
Just checked Marissa Mayer's X account, can someone explain why is her account not getting enough views/reach - https://x.com/marissamayer
She apparently has 1.4M followers with barely 20 likes. This was even worse a few months back.
Are those followers bought / dormant? Or is twitter suppressing it?
I went back half a year in her account, and it seems like it was entirely re-Tweets and self-promotion? It would make sense if the algorithm isn't prioritizing that kind of content, or that kind of content isn't gaining traction.
I saw she re-Tweeted something from Bryan Johnson. Looking at his account, he has less than half as many followers, but many more likes and a lot more engagement. But it's almost all his own content, and it's content that readers would actually find engaging.
Nobody currently uses Twitter so follower count implies nothing. Lots of notorious figures have posted regarding how they get the same interaction rate on Bluesky even though they supposedly have 10x or even 1000x more followers on Twitter.
For example: https://bsky.app/profile/brandonfriedman.bsky.social/post/3l...
There was an algo change a couple of weeks back. I saw a few accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers saying they were getting only dozens of likes on their posts. (mostly accounts that had dissed Musk, so factor that possibility in)
I checked Mayer's account and it's not under any sort of shadowban that's detectible with the regular tools, which are usually very accurate.
Free speech for me but not for thee
I can’t, but influence is bought and temporary. People aren’t found off the person, but what she represents in society. And since she spent 8 years buried at Yahoo!, busy executing the winddown plan (masterfully), she may have inadvertently communicated that she’s expert in liquidation. Not something you follow when you want to know what the future is.
(Insert a distasteful joke about how she would have made a killing at DOGE).
Twitter is all bots.
It's a ghost town for anything substantive, if she's not shouting about culture war stuff she's not likely to get much engagement.
> It's a ghost town for anything substantive
It always was. Twitter delenda est is a meme for a reason.
Everyone is a genius writing what went wrong but never have the guts to short it as it unfolds.
In all fairness, that really stands to reason: retrospective analysis is enormously much easier, more precise and less risky than prediction, for the simple reason that after the fact (especially this long and with lots of inside people having spoken up since), there is enormously more data available than before it went downhill. So it's much less a question of having guts than of having access to sufficient data to see enough of the whole picture.
I agree and would’ve written the same several years ago. Unfortunately, shorting is expensive and you have to get the timing right, too, not only the direction of the stock. If you’re early when shorting, you’re still wrong.
Also a slow decline is not lucrative enough in comparison to the risk.
I interviewed at yahoo during the tenure of Marissa Meyer and decided not to join after noticing a strange lack of diversity in my interviewers (I saw a similar lack of diversity at Apple Pay much more recently), anytime top level organizations become infested by monocultures, it becomes impossible for progress, new ideas and innovation to take foot. It doesn’t matter which clique or group has infected the organization by giving priority to conformity over diversity, it all ends the same way. This is not a call for institutional DEI, this is about being on the lookout for monocultures in innovative organizations.
I think Yahoo faded into irrelevance since it viewed itself as a media company and not a technology company.
Many internet companies fancied themselves media companies in the 1990s and 2000s. They all are on the scrap heap now, some examples: AOL, Yahoo, Excite@Home, Lycos, iVillage, About.com.
The companies of the time that fancied themselves technology/infra/logistics did well: Google, Amazon, eBay/PayPal, Salesforce, Akamai, DoubleClick.
Of course any lists like this have selection bias, so maybe I am wrong.
I am reminded of LICRA v. Yahoo. Another puzzling choice of Yahoo's that seems very wrong in hindsight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LICRA_v._Yahoo!
In an odd turn of events I have ben one a regular user of Yahoo! despite how terrible the experience and content is. It shipped as a Safari default years and years ago and has remained in my neglected Safari bookmarks for no particular reason. I’ve recently reverted to using Safari on iPhone as my default mobile browser and used to rely on my recently used tabs for a quick dopamine hit. Several months ago Apple removed that from the new tab experience, putting my bookmarks front and center. So I use Yahoo. It’s mostly clickbait content, heavily monetized, with all of the excrement of 20 years of AdTech on display. Ads routinely load in the wrong unit size, or with a double quote character that breaks the sticky container making it impossible to view the next page of comments. Most often the ads are mobile redirects that just crash the page and lose your scroll position. It’s really a terrible experience to behold. At least I don’t use social media.
I recall the Zookeeper paper from Yahoo scientist which basically details a more useful version of Google’s chubby. I find reliability and design of Zookeeper fascinating these days cool kids use etcd mostly because of relatively complex protocol of Zookeeper (there is a few implementations but they lack the polish of Java client).
There is a drop-in, protocol-compatible replacement for ZooKeeper - ClickHouse Keeper: https://clickhouse.com/clickhouse/keeper
Many applications depend on ZooKeeper's data model and client libraries, and can't switch to etcd. Things like watches and ephemeral nodes are different there.
iirc problem of the zookeeper was that it was a chunky java application. etcd is tiny go binary. so there is more to it than just complexity of the protocol itself.
del.icio.us was my favorite tool on the internet for a few years (perhaps even still in retrospect). And not far off from the same functionality as Facebook (today). Why purchase such a thing to shut it down?
Money which needed to be burned I guess (for accounting tricks).
I wonder how much macroeconomics and politics had to do with Yahoo's situation.
During this period, the US had been exporting large amounts of dollars to foreign investors (US going into deficit) and these foreign investors didn't know what to do with all those dollars so they dumped them onto the US stock market. This has been going on for decades. It was the premise of the Japan carry trade.
US companies like Google or Facebook would have had access to plenty of capital during this time and maybe it allowed them to be picky.
In summary, decades of failed leadership resulting in zero corporate focus.
They're the epitome of a corporate melange of services and products that resulted in far, far less than the sum of its parts.
Every now and then, and especially in the past 3 - 4 years I really want to recreate Yahoo, or a curated Web Directory. Bring back the small Web, and a small gif for all webpage saying they are featured on yahoo.
95% of today's Web site are now complete garbage. And with AI written content I wont be surprised if this is now closer to 98%.
I wonder what went right with Yahoo Japan, and how it was so successful here that it's still a mainstay for many to this day
Related post I saw an hour after writing this: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/edmund-ho-1277b2125_yahoo-jap...
Yahoo did have a unique ability to smother any business that it acquired -- and I think the reasons go way beyond an inability to monetize them. In fact, I'd argue that it was actually Yahoo's fixation with short-term monetization strategies that eventually turned everything to dust.
Consider Flickr, which Yahoo bought for about $25 million in 2005. If you're a tech visionary, you look at this popular little photo-sharing site and say: "Wow, everyone's connectivity speeds are soaring, and we could morph this into a video site, too!" And then, maybe, you've invented YouTube.
Or, you look at the way Friendstr and Facebook are getting traction, and you say: "Wow, what if we built out easier commenting and a social-network feed with abundant sharing of popular photos among users' pals?" And then maybe you've invented Instagram.
But Yahoo's metrics-driven managers refused to stretch their brains in this direction. I've been told by two famous-name insiders at the time that Yahoo's approach to everything was to set short-term targets focused on existing metrics, with rigid focus on hitting quarterly targets. It was all about driving orderly growth of what was already there, rather than any desire to explore new and uncharted areas.
In essence, Yahoo had a Silicon Valley address but a Battle Creek, Mich., mindset. Purple logo aside, Yahoo owed a lot more to the way W.W. Kellogg had been running its cereal business for decades, as opposed to anything going on in the 650 area code.
>And then, maybe, you've invented YouTube.
SUPER unlikely.
Everybody forgets that YouTube was a massive money loser that was floated by VC money. Had Google not bought YouTube, it was doomed.
That's actually the point. Yahoo in 2005 had the financial muscle -- and an interesting starting point via Flickr's user base -- to spin up its own version of YouTube without needing to do an acquisition. Stronger Yahoo leadership would have stomached the get-started costs of an internal build-out, because of a sense of what this could become.
Yahoo just lacked the imagination and nerve necessary to see how its own assets could lead to the next big thing.
Yet Google failed to build a social network, Apple failed to build a car and Microsoft failed to muscle its way into the mobile market.
And now Bytedance beat every US competitor, including Google's YouTube, Amazon's Twitch and Facebook's Instagram with what? An app that lets you upload 10s videos.
Maybe it's not so easy.
Youtube was also going to get buried under lawsuits for copyright infringement. Being part of a big brand gave them a lot of legal cover.
This doesn't actually answer what went wrong for Yahoo!. The main insight is that Yahoo! saw that it made money from traffic, so it bought traffic generators without regard for if the traffic could be profitable. I buy this argument, but Yahoo!'s problem was people stopped going to Yahoo!, and none of its acquisitions were big enough to offset that.
So you're saying their traffic generation did not work.
How about possibly also failing for being too US centered, basically being an "internet portal" but mainly for the US. Sure Yahoo where _huge_ 2000, but it was never the main goto portal in Scandinavia where I grew up using internet from the mid 90s.
Here Altavista was the defacto standard for search until Google replaced. For the portal aspect of Yahoo, there were local alternatives with more relevant material.
I don't see that Yahoo ever succeeded globally.
Really rare to find a company with such a bad luck, judgement and the cascade of bad decisions; it's strange that after all of that, they're still hanging in there
Dotcom boom gave them one hell of a momentum
To me, Yahoo always seemed more trustworthy than Google or Facebook.
I started using Internet actively around 1996 or so. For me Yahoo practically didn't even exist, their homepage was a hodgepodge of everything and I couldn't figure out why I would go there. My search usage was mainly AltaVista with some HotBot, Northern Light, and Raging Search mixed in. But never Yahoo.
Yahoo wanted to be internet's hotspot for everything....ironically enough Google become that despite the fact that they rose to power because of their minimalism and search focus.
What’s ironic is that during all they time period and even today it’s still one of the top trafficked website.
https://www.semrush.com/website/top/
Other companies would kill for Yahoo’s traffic
Could the issue be that they went from technical founder to spreadsheet leadership without having a hyper-competitive visionary?
It’s seems like they had plenty of genius and adults in the room, but no hyper-competitive Musk/Zuck/Ellison/Jobs/Gates.
Instead of saying what went wrong for Yahoo (default state and expectation), it is worthwhile noting everything that went right for Google and Meta. Alternate theories don't amount to any insight apart from hindsight is 20/20.
We had a really bad manager join my company recently, and the company has begun to go downhill. Many years ago, this same manager worked for Yahoo. I can't help but feel like this manager is at least partially responsible for Yahoo's downfall, in a sort of butterfly effect way.
I think their CEOs were obviously why everything went wrong for Yahoo, especially Marissa Mayer.
I miss Yahoo Games. My favourite was dominoes, many hours spent in there as a teenager. The only Yahoo thing I've accessed for the past decade or so is Finance, the stock price info and the investing news seems to still be reasonable.
I think that Marissa Meyer had given yahoo back a bit of its lustre. That meant cutting dividends in favour of investment. Restoring a reputation takes time. I stopped taking an interest when she was ousted by impatient shareholders. I am not an insider, maybe I am wrong.
She wasn't ousted because shareholders were impatient. She was ousted because under her leadership Yahoo had collapsed to the point that the only thing left to do was to sell it.
When a new CEO is brought in to right a sinking ship (which Yahoo very much was at the time of her hiring), their number one responsibility is to have a solid core strategy based in leveraging the company's existing strengths and then execute competently on it.
She had no solid core strategy. Her strategy at Yahoo, as she described it, was "to throw lots of spaghetti at the purple walls and see what sticks"; which is exactly what she needed to not be doing. She blew a lot of money on a lot of very varied things and ended up with lots of expensive puzzle pieces with no plan for how to fit them all together into something that would stop Yahoo's bleeding.
At the end, the company as a whole had a valuation less than the company's Alibaba investment -- she drove Yahoo not just to zero, but past zero; and that's 100% due to her not understanding how to lead a shrinking company.
This is basically correct.
Did the author actually explain what went wrong with Yahoo? I mostly read through the thing but didn't learn much.
I feel like the correct, boring answer is "they didn't focus on getting people the best website for what they were searching for"
Yahoo finance is still doing okay, I guess.
>in 2008, Microsoft offered $44.6 billion to acquire Yahoo.
Steve Ballmer was even more crazier than I thought.
I can't tell who was crazier in that deal. Ballmer or whoever was in charge on the Yahoo side that turned him down.
Does anyone have a good book recommendation on Yahoo? I’d love to read more on the people who ran it into the ground.
I wasn't there but from talking with people working there it was a culture of waiting for the next paycheck and staying under the radar, not caring and not doing much work.
Some 20-30 people I chat with were all the kind you should immediately fire and escort out of the building. Some had their next job lined up already just in case. lol
"In 1998, Yahoo turned down the opportunity to acquire Google for $1 million."
Sure, but Google is not inflating due to a cosmological constant. If Yahoo had acquired Google, Google would now be worthless, not a trillion-dollar company.
Exactly.
Don't forget that Yahoo bought three search engines.
(Full disclosure: I worked for one of the companies they acquired).
> Google is not inflating due to a cosmological constant
Well put!
what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?
From falsehood, anything follows. (I'm implying here that you don't have unstoppable force and you don't have immovable object)
If your grandmother had wheels, then she's be a bicycle.
From contradiction, non-contradiction.
MSN.
I like how MSN manages to pack so much content onto a single page—it’s surprisingly intuitive. I’m not sure why that kind of formatting isn’t more common.
A deflection.
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Yahoo is still quite popular in Japan.
Yahoo Japan is a different company to Yahoo.
Yahoo itself is still used more than almost any site on the web. Including TikTok
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites
How much of that is people not noticing it's their default browser page? Idk
Does the Japanese Web still sport a 90s aesthetic? That would explain it.
And yet Yahoo! is still in the top ten in web traffic.
First Yahoo did Yahoo Serious, then Yahoo got did