Yahoo: January 2011
January 19, 2011
Yahoo’s search share is flat. The signals about Flickr and Delicious are mixed. The company is chugging along a familiar path. One of our colleagues opined, “Poor, poor Yahoo.” The reason was that the speaker was old enough to remember the early days might wonder what in the world has happened.
“The Decline & Fall of the Yahoo Empire” lays the blame squarely at the feet of the sadly neglected engineer. The notable quote: “Managers and executives who don’t understand programming want to believe that it’s just plumbing, and that programmers are fungible. This is simply not the case. A good programmer isn’t a mere two- or three-times as productive as a bad one; the multiple is more like 20 or 50, if not higher. Hiring ‘a programmer’ is like signing ‘a football player’; there are millions who play, but only a minority are good enough for a professional team, and only a tiny few can play in the biggest league.” From my perspective, yes, this seems to be the case with Yahoo. Yahoo seems to buy and buy ideas (startups), but then the people who came up with these ideas leave and leave. It doesn’t seem like all that long ago that startups couldn’t wait to be bought out by Yahoo, and yet now they’d rather risk sinking than swim in Yahoo’s big toxic pond. Geocities, Zimbra, AltaVista — the list goes on and on.
Alice Wasielewski, January 19, 2011
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