The rise and fall of Yahoo

[oracleslave]

How much you paid them over those years of using their free services and how many times you've clicked on their ads?

0

Doesn't mean I have a grudge.

[AtW]

0

Doesn't mean I have a grudge.

No, you are worse for it was you who truly destroyed it - cost them resources without paying, unlike grudgers who did not cost them a penny

[NickFitz]

No, you are worse for it was you who truly destroyed it - cost them resources without paying, unlike grudgers who did not cost them a penny

I spent five months of my time there working on a project called Yocal. Given the overall size of the team, including front and back end engineers, database specialists, UX specialists, interaction designers, management, et al, I reckon there must have been about thirty creature-years of work put into it. There was also an external graphic design firm whose work was ultimately discarded in its entirety and the graphic design done all over again in-house. Oh, and translators, as the intention was to launch simultaneously in English and French.

Then they threw away the lot because a startup round the corner in Leicester Square had done the same thing, but actually got it working and launched, while our project was mired in layers of management dithering.

That's where the money went: layers of middle management failing to ship anything. In fact Drew McLellan, who was on that project and left during it, said precisely that when he left: Time to Take Stock - All in the head.

[ctdctd]

Yahoo, were they not around at about the same time as the floppy disk and AOL?

Almost as dead as Nokia

[Gentile]

I've never understood how people can consider free web offerings that are based on a model of presenting advertisements to users of a free service to be viable commodities. They always seem to fall down on two main counts:

1. People aren't stupid
2. Adblock Plus exists

Companies like LinkedIn and GroupOn, whilst they turn over a lot, have never been profitable. And I'm pretty sure that the likes of Google and Facebook, who seem to get by in the advertising world by ignoring privacy and antitrust issues like there was no tomorrow, are grossly over-valued too. Whilst they report large profits right now, it's hard to see them sustaining the growth they'll need even to stay afloat once advertisers finally realise they're not getting their money's worth.

I keep waiting for this multi-national web business bubble to burst, the way the dot com bubble did, and the way the sub-prime mortgage bubble did. It's not quite there yet, but I'm certain that in about 5/6 years time people will be looking back and wondering how investors could ever have been so stupid as to put money into companies with so little inherent value.

[MrMark]

It's this bit that staggers me

Jan 2008 Microsoft offers $44.6 billion for Yahoo!, setting the value at $31 a share. Yahoo! spurns the offer

[OwlHoot]

They should have extended my contract in December 2007, as they were going to do until Sunnyvale imposed a hiring/renewal freeze

WHS, only in my case 2009

[MarillionFan]

They should have extended my contract in December 2007, as they were going to do until Sunnyvale imposed a hiring/renewal freeze

Should have got into cloud computing instead. Then you'd find yourself in Palo Alto, Sunnyvale and Mountain View all the time.

[NickFitz]

Should have got into cloud computing instead. Then you'd find yourself in Palo Alto, Sunnyvale and Mountain View all the time.

Why on earth would I want to go there?

I wouldn't go to the USA if they begged me. Hideous totalitarian place.

[jmo21]

I've never understood how people can consider free web offerings that are based on a model of presenting advertisements to users of a free service to be viable commodities. They always seem to fall down on two main counts:

1. People aren't stupid
2. Adblock Plus exists

Companies like LinkedIn and GroupOn, whilst they turn over a lot, have never been profitable. And I'm pretty sure that the likes of Google and Facebook, who seem to get by in the advertising world by ignoring privacy and antitrust issues like there was no tomorrow, are grossly over-valued too. Whilst they report large profits right now, it's hard to see them sustaining the growth they'll need even to stay afloat once advertisers finally realise they're not getting their money's worth.

I keep waiting for this multi-national web business bubble to burst, the way the dot com bubble did, and the way the sub-prime mortgage bubble did. It's not quite there yet, but I'm certain that in about 5/6 years time people will be looking back and wondering how investors could ever have been so stupid as to put money into companies with so little inherent value.

Why does TV exist?

Because people either pay subscription fees or have adverts thrown at them

In the latter, it must work well enough that advertisers keep paying. And with tv, there is no 'click through'. It's about getting the brand out there in people's subconscious.

With the web, they get that and click throughs.

I'd love to know the percentage of web browsers using Adblock & similar. I imagine it's quite low.

Advertising isn't going anywhere, but it will continue to change to keep up with the times.