Ask Slashdot: Can Yahoo Actually Stage a Comeback? 260
Nerval's Lobster writes "Fresh off purchasing Tumblr for $1.1 billion, Yahoo has moved to the next stage of what's becoming a company-wide reboot: fixing Flickr, the photo-sharing service that it acquired in 2005 and subsequently allowed to languish. Yahoo boosted Flickr accounts' individual storage capacity to one free terabyte, revamped the Website's overall look, and launched a new Flickr app for Google Android, among other tweaks. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer clearly wants her company to fight toe-to-toe on features with Google and Facebook, but she faces a long road ahead of her: not only does she need to streamline Yahoo's cumbersome corporate structure and product portfolio into something that resembles fighting shape, but she needs to reverse the general perception that Yahoo is teetering on the edge of history's trash-bin, with an aging customer base and unexciting features. The question is, could anyone actually pull it off? Is Yahoo capable of an Apple-style turnaround, or are its current actions merely delaying the inevitable?"
Of course (Score:5, Insightful)
Yahoo *could* stage a comeback, but why? What makes a product or service from Yahoo unique?
Can't answer that question? Of course not. Yahoo is a holding company made up of numerous acquisitions. [wikipedia.org] If there's an identity buried in there somewhere, it's a Frankenstein's monster, stitched together out of spare parts. There's nothing cohesive about Yahoo, nothing that makes it special as a company, and there never was.
Re:Of course (Score:4, Insightful)
Can't answer that question? Of course not. Yahoo is a holding company made up of numerous acquisitions. [wikipedia.org] If there's an identity buried in there somewhere, it's a Frankenstein's monster, stitched together out of spare parts. There's nothing cohesive about Yahoo, nothing that makes it special as a company, and there never was.
That's all true. But the question is whether or not that can be changed ;-)
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That's all true. But the question is whether or not that can be changed ;-)
The answer is: Does it even matter? Windows: On the desktop: "Holy crap! Fire the UI design team, wait Vista viruses work on 8? Aaaah! Don't use it for servers! What are you insane?" In Gaming: "Hmm, not to shabby. Why can't they do this on the desktop?" On Search: "What's a Bing?!" On Phones: "HA ha ha ha HA ha ha"
So, Dr. Frankenstein's Monster seems to be the only way any things ever really done. Just look at Google. A search and ads company that wants to replicate designer Geordi Laforge vi
Re:Of course (Score:4, Interesting)
Yahoo *could* stage a comeback, but why? What makes a product or service from Yahoo unique?
Can't answer that question? Of course not. Yahoo is a holding company made up of numerous acquisitions. If there's an identity buried in there somewhere, it's a Frankenstein's monster, stitched together out of spare parts. There's nothing cohesive about Yahoo, nothing that makes it special as a company, and there never was.
So what if it's made up of acquisitions...? I doubt there's very many large companies that haven't made a significant number of acquisitions. All three with far more than 100 companies bought or merged with:
http://www.cisco.com/web/about/doing_business/corporate_development/acquisitions/about_cisco_acquisitions.html [cisco.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Google [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_IBM [wikipedia.org]
By the way, it seems that Yahoo! has the fewest acquisitions of any of the three, including your oh so dear to your heart google.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Yahoo! [wikipedia.org]
How'd you get marked insightful?
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Yeah, but Yahoo had some of the stupidest acquisitions, starting with the $5.7B debacle known as Broadcast.com.
The only thing of any note coming out of that deal is the Dallas Mavericks winning the NBA championship (otherwise known as "Thank you Yahoo!... you suckers! Sincerely, Mark Cuban")
Re:Of course (Score:5, Informative)
I was employed with Yahoo when they made the WFH change. We were lied to even within the company. It was initially communicated permanent WFH employees would no longer be able to WFH to help drive innovation. 160-something permanent WFH people out of ~16,000 employees were suppose to make a HUGE impact on innovation?? It became clear shortly after the announcement that it was BS. The real reason was communicated a few days later. They made the decision after looking at the VPN logs and saw people WFH weren't even logging in. Not necessarily the permanent WFH people, just in general. It wasn't a stealth layoff, it was a get people to actually do their work.
Do I think Yahoo will make a comeback? Absolutely not. There is way too much dysfunction in that company to fix.
ssh (Score:2)
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Frankly, you could ask the same question, substituting "Google", and give the same answer.
The only real difference between them is Google is (and inexplicably remains) a darling of the soi-disant technorati. Hence the constant stream of comments like yours and those in the summary. In reality, Yahoo! is much like Facebook, doing decently despite the fact that a narrow and shallow demographic disapproves of i
There are many more differences between them (Score:2)
For starters, people actually use and like Google's products. Everyone uses Google search - everyone. There is a reason "to Google" is a verb people use in daily life and "to Bing" is not unless it is being forced down someone's throat by product placement. People use GMail en masse, again because they like it, not because people are telling them to or because it came with their ISP. People actively MOVE to GMail and make new accounts. Who uses Yahoo mail besides people trying to keep a decade-old email add
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It is not the tech community, it is the business community.
5 Billion in profit may sound like a lot to you and me, but to a company with 11,000 employees it is chump change. There is a reason Yahoo only has a 7x P/E and a $27 stock price... the outlook is horrible. Yahoo's annual revenue has DECLINED every year since 2009. Compare to Google who has doubled there revenue since 2009, and grown it roughly 50% the past two years. Compare to Google, who makes 10x the revenue yahoo does with only 5x the headcount
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Google+ Photos (aka Picasa) has 343 million active users. Flickr has 87million. I think Google has photo sharing figured out.
Google groups also dwarfs Yahoo groups. Not only do they have 30 years of back data but the sheer number of available groups is about 100x. I don't even know how you can compare Yahoo to Google in this respect, it is kind of nonsensical.
iGoogle is being retired because no one uses it. Just liek no one uses My Yahoo. Personalized home pages is about 10 years ago.
Re:Of course (Score:4, Informative)
Except that it made $3.370.000,000 in net profit. I have to wonder why people keep talking about can Yahoo stage a comeback. It is still making a lot of money. I wish I was failing by only making 3.75 billion dollars.
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What makes a product or service from Yahoo unique?
I'm kinda partial to their chocolate 'Yahoo' drink that comes in the glass bottle at the convenience store.
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At least one thing is unique - Flickr (Score:2)
What makes a product or service from Yahoo unique?
Flickr for one is now unique. It was not before. But the new all-out focus on always seeing the largest image possible is quite different than any other photo sharing site. All of the others, even 500px, drill down into a single image view with a small image, Yahoo displays as much as possible in the window it is given.
Of course they "could" (Score:3)
Yahoo *could* stage a comeback
Indeed.
Broadcast.com (that Yahoo payed $5billion for) was the premier video site and *could* take over Netflix +Youtube.
Geocities (that Yahoo paid $3-4billion for) was the premier social networking site, and *could* take over MySpace and Facebook.
Altavista (that Yahoo bought along with Overture) was the premier search inge, and *could* take over Bing and Google.
But it's Yahoo, so they won't.
Re:Of course (Score:5, Interesting)
IMHO that's just her way of waking everybody up and making it clear this boat is changing its course. With time, I'm sure people will be working remotely once again.
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Re:Of course (Score:5, Informative)
Because she's a female. If she were a man, we could call him an "overrated bozo". You wouldn't call a woman a "bozo", since that's a reference to Bozo the Clown, who was a man.
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No, because she's a bimbo. Do a little research, the facts aren't hard to find.
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Yes, that may very well be, but if she were a male, you wouldn't call her (him) that. A stupid male you might call a "bozo" (or just a moron or idiot), but never a "bimbo"; that's reserved for women. I'm only pointing this out because it loos like PlastikMissle has some kind of problem with the usage of the word "bimbo". I'm just pointing out that it's entirely appropriate.
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No, it just wouldn't make any sense, just like calling a man a "bimbo" wouldn't make any sense at all. Calling a woman a "bimbo", and a man a "bozo", is fine; you're just alleging that the person in question is not very competent.
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cancelling all remote working while the rest of the word is learning how to adapt to and benefit from it
Google doesn't allow much remote work either. Are you claiming Google is also run by idiotic, overrated bimbos?
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I talked to someone who works for Yahoo who told me that, out of the roughly 11K employees, this affects only around a couple of hundred. Of those, many will simply get a desk/cubicle at the office (thereby meeting the "on site" requirement), but actually still work at home most of the time. The reality is that this is basically a non-change.
That being the case, it still makes you wonder (if it's
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Simple: It's a PR stunt.
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But it's bad PR.
Good reason for working local.... (Score:2)
Good reason for working local....
You can not inculcate a corporate culture change with remote workers without at least a token presence at the ground zero. It just does not work to state that "the company has changed" without forced acknowledgement that it has changed.
Marissa did the right thing here, even though it's not clear her overall direction is "the right thing". Remote workers do not "buy it" and if they don't, everything breaks down. Not sure that her direction is right, but pointing "there" inst
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I'm just amazed by the fervor of the Marissa apologists. Marissa did an obviously stupid thing which is sure to bite Yahoo on the ass. Everybody knows what the problem is at Yahoo with lazy, tenured senior engineers. Cancelling remote was just stupid, the real problem is letting the slackers get away with it. Now they will just slack in the office and Marissa will be perfectly happy. Meanwhile, anybody with talent will be thinking twice about hanging around at Yahoo waiting for the next stupid edict. She go
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I'm just amazed by the fervor of the Marissa apologists. Marissa did an obviously stupid thing which is sure to bite Yahoo on the ass. Everybody knows what the problem is at Yahoo with lazy, tenured senior engineers. Cancelling remote was just stupid, the real problem is letting the slackers get away with it. Now they will just slack in the office and Marissa will be perfectly happy. Meanwhile, anybody with talent will be thinking twice about hanging around at Yahoo waiting for the next stupid edict. She got booted from the executive suite at Google for doing stupid things too. If she plays her cards right she will be out of Yahoo before the shit hits the fan and on to her next victim smelling like a rose.
The people I know are pretty much geniuses,
Peter Wemm is a genius.
I am not a fan of Marissa; she has this anti-genius bias that will bite her in the mediocrity. I can definitely see why she has made the decisions she did, however. Normal nerd vs. genius nerd is a "slow and steady" approach. It will not serve her well, but it is understandable.
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If she were a man, the technical term would be "dickhead".
Look closer (Score:2, Funny)
He signed it there at the end.
The plan (Score:2)
1) Make copycat Internet company (say... copy Pandora)
2) Name it after a verb with a grammatically incorrect "er" (how about... Castr)
3) Get bought by Yahoo
4) Profit!
No. (Score:2)
TLDR: no.
Longer answer: No.
Why?
Leadership. There is none.
So... no.
--
BMO
Still nothing about the ipad? (Score:2)
I'm really surprised at that. Tablets are good for little more than looking at pictures and video, and the ipad is the most popular tablet. Annoucing a revamp of flickr by redesigning th
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Or, you can use Safari. I have both an iPad 3 and an iPhone, and find that site-specific apps are far less necessary on the iPad, since the screen is big enough that most sites work reasonably well. As to whether that is the case with Flickr site specifically, I'm not sure.
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Destroyed Flickr (Score:2)
Come back to what? (Score:2)
Can it grow? Sure. Can it grow significantly? Sure! Can it be the next Facebook/Google? Maybe.. doubtful.
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Facebook can't even be the next Facebook, these days.
delaying the inevitable... (Score:2)
Well, of course it's actions are delaying the inevitable. That's all any company's actions do. Just like, we're all dying, just some faster than others.
They blew a golden opportunity (Score:3, Insightful)
Yahoo had the perfect opportunity for roll-your-sites and social networks. Geocities and related services were popular in the late 90's, but they didn't improve the products, such as making them more click-to-build etc. so users didn't have to learn HTML. They sat on it and it rotted. They also had a reputation for crappy customer service. They could have been the next Facebook + Google.
Parts can... (Score:2)
No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not with the complete Moron CEO they have. That woman has no idea how to run a business. You do NOT insult your customers to gain market share...
Her Comments , “There’s no such thing as Flickr Pro today because [with so many people taking photographs] there’s really no such thing as professional photographers anymore...”
I really hope someone told her that she was a complete idiot for saying those words at a press conference.
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Flickr can, in fact, get rid of the high-power users in exchange for more of the instagram crowd and gain marketshare and profits. The changes seem to be aimed squarely at that. Yahoo undoubtedly has far more data on their users than we do. Whether the decision is based on a reasonable inter
With Facebook integration as bad as this... (Score:2)
Raise the pirate flag. (Score:2, Funny)
What would they come back to? (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple started off making computers (or maybe "integrated hardware/software experiences" is a better way to put it). After their comeback, they still made computers. Now their big thing is portable computers -- a big change, but still related to what they always did. Their focus is on design and UX expertise.
Yahoo started off making a hierarchical directory of web sites, then dove into the web portal craze of the late 1990s. After their comeback, they will ___________. Their focus is on ___________.
Fill in the blanks. It's not going to be what they did before, because nobody wants more hierarchical web directories and portals. They have a bunch of people still using their webmail, so that's one option. GMail wiped the floor with them before, but it's been getting clunky lately thanks to G+. Yahoo could try to recapture the clean simplicity of Google's early days. That would be a big challenge indeed -- as a portal company, the idea of leaving blank space on a web page is utterly alien to them.
It looks like they're producing independent news. That's an interesting option -- they could compete with the Huffington Post et al. Online news is still based strongly on newspapers, so there's room for someone to shake up the format.
This all seems like a stretch, though. Yahoo's name has little value, and their current expertise isn't very helpful. All they bring to the table is more money than a startup, but it probably won't be enough to save them. Then again, that's what I said about Apple too.
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social and cloud?
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After their comeback, they will ___________. Their focus is on ___________.
After their comeback, they will HIRE Time Berners Lee. Their focus is on the Semantic Web.
Why would the inventor of the WWW work for Yahoo?
Because you give him ALL the resources to make his dream a coherent reality.
Long shot for sure, but its what I would do.
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What saved Apple was a leader with creativity and vision, and a rabid fan base.
I don't know if Yahoo has the former, but I can tell you with certainty that they don't have the latter. They have a solid user base, but they're by no means fans. Which means that they cannot afford to make as many mistakes as Apple could.
Look! Free stuff! (Score:2)
...in the meantime, they're throwing ads on the site unless you want to pay $50/year (current, well former, cost for Pro with unlimited storage is $25/year), and if you want twice as much space, then that will be $500. Personally, I was fine with the way that flickr was. Now I need a plan to rescue all my photos on there while I wait and see if I want to stick around the new ad-based site.
The problem yahoo has is (Score:2)
from money.cnn.com today (Score:2)
http://money.cnn.com/gallery/magazines/fortune/2013/05/21/5-worst-internet-acquisitions-of-all-time.fortune/index.html [cnn.com]
TOP 5 WORST INTERNET ACQUISITIONS
Yahoo bough Broadcast.com, an online television site founded by Mark Cuban, for $5.7 billion in 1999
Yahoo acquired GeoCities for $3.6 billion
TOP 5 BEST INTERNET ACQUISITIONS
Google's acquisition of Android, the mobile operating system maker, was miniscule at an estimated $50 million. But the deal eight years ago
A Comeback? Possibly. (Score:3)
Well, Yahoogroups is sort of useful (Score:2)
Seems doubtful to me. Yahoogroups is the only thing I use made by Yahoo, and they don't really "make" it as such. The content is all from other users. Yahoo hasn't done a good job monetizing it either. They happily send me a digest every so often which has no branding or ads or anything.
Clearly some sort of brilliant minimalist marketing strategy I don't comprehend.
My ISP converted all their email accounts over to Yahoo, but I don't exactly use Yahoo for that either. I have Gmail POP it. From my persp
You know who should stage a comeback? (Score:2)
Slashdot should stage a comeback.
The future for Yahoo.... (Score:4, Interesting)
One of my friends started his own venture capital business years ago, after a long career in corporate I.T. (He focuses on funding educational related projects.)
We were talking a bit about the recent changes at Yahoo, and I know his opinion is that the Tumblr purchase is ill-advised. and looks like it cost the company pretty much all of the available capital it had to spend. After that, I don't think Yahoo is in a financial position to do much more in the way of acquiring anything else. They've got to make do with revamping what they already own (and maybe they think talent obtained from Tumbler will help towards that end?).
The thing is, Yahoo spent FAR too long concerning themselves with convincing people their "branding" was still relevant, and thought they could somehow "win" simply by reminding folks to consider them for search queries. (Remember all the annoying "Yaaaaahhhhhoooooooo!" ads on TV?)
Now, even if the current CEO is trying to make serious changes, I think it's going to be too little, too late. Figuring out a way to monetize Tumblr is a full-time job in itself -- and one you MIGHT want to take on if you were an otherwise profitable and successful company. But Yahoo seems like they just bought themselves a big database of porn and pet pictures that has a relatively short shelf-life, before it's not "trendy" to use anymore and the user-base moves on to something else.
Flickr really was a significantly good service they owned. I knew quite a few photographers who religiously uploaded their work to Flickr (typically with a Pro account since they wanted more storage space and ability to put full resolution photos up). But as they let it stagnate, all sorts of other "Johnny come lately" photo sharing services popped up -- many integrated real tightly with mobile phones, which have become the #1 device used to take photos in the first place.
The press-conference "slam" against pro photographers tells me Yahoo still thinks it needs to cater to the mainstream -- exactly the group they'll have the most competition with. Bad move. If they really enhanced a paid, "Pro" side of the service and kept it cheaper than alternatives -- I know a LOT of people who have at least a second job dealing in photography who'd sign up and use it.
Email is a non-starter at this point. Lots of us still have yahoo email accounts, but it's very often just because of old partnerships they struck with ISPs like the regional Bell telephone companies and later AT&T. You ordered your DSL service? You got a Yahoo email with it. Yahoo Groups had a good run but again, they let it pretty much die off. I used to use it occasionally until the groups all seemed to fill rapidly with spam, and upload/download speeds on attachments got so pitifully slow, you wondered if the whole thing ran on an old Pentium 3 in someone's basement. They only get search queries, by and large, because they manage to work deals to keep it a "default" search engine in various programs. None of their stuff really stands out as a tool you want to use that you can't get elsewhere.
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Marissa Meyer's tumblr purchase strategy isn't nuts, just the price ($1.1 billion?!?!)
Meyer wants to improve Yahoo's current products, and move Yahoo to a focused social media/portal platform. She's counting on Yahoo grabbing a piece of the mobile social media pie, which no big player has right now. (Google would be closest.) This is what will fuel Yahoo's "comeback" into relevance. The problem is that Yahoo has zero product presence in mobile. She's buying tumblr as an infrastructure purchase.
The ne
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I'm ex-Yahoo, and I know first hand how utterly rotten the culture was when I left. I once was on a mission to decom a handful of crappy servers running some really crappy code. They were once, in the mists of time, used to perform some tracking on a particular campaign, and were the brain-child of an idiot architect. They cost money to run, so I tried to find who consumed the information they produced. I checked around, and actually found people very helpful - it turns out, no one was using the data, so I
It's been coming... (Score:2)
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Sure Yahoo! could stage a comeback, the same way (Score:2)
Apple did.
Make cool stuff that people want to use. It's not rocket science, it's just that there's so much dead weight in most companies living inside the company bubble with wrongheaded ideas about what the public wants and overvalued MBA degrees that it's rare.
A bit of hard data, a bit of freedom for forward-thinking designers and developers, including the realization that they need to be aggressive, not conservative, update/relaunch products at 2013 speeds (as opposed to 1994 speeds), and embrace things
Does Yahoo sell e-mail content to spammers? (Score:2)
A few weeks ago I e-mailed my wife's yahoo account, from my Google account, to ask her if a house we're buying has an alarm system. A few hours later I received an e-mailed advertisement from ADT in my Yahoo spam folder. How does this happen? Its not this one incident, my Yahoo spam generally tracks with what I've been e-mailing people about.
The answer to this question aside, I find Yahoo to be increasingly sleazy and malware-like. I hope that Yahoo can't make a comeback without cleaning up their act.
They have to (Score:2)
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:the new flickr interface (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, it is. It's a horrible Metroised mess of pictures that trades function for shiny.
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So what's better?
I'm kinda annoyed that Google+ automatically uploads everything from my phone's camera gallery, but there's not really a good way to pull down from my Picasa albums shared on Google+ to my phone's Gallery, without swimming through a bunch of third-party apps.
FWIW, the only "third party" picture interface app that I've really liked is "Floating Image", which can pull from various feeds including Facebook and Flickr and probably Picasa / Google+ / or whatever passes for Google's photo service
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You could get a very similar look years ago on Flickriver, Flickrhivemind, and probably a few other places. People have been using the APIs to create that look. The latter has infinite scrolling, and they both put your pictures on a black background and hide your comments.
Yes folks, Flickr's big innovation essentially takes something that 3rd parties have been doing, and forces it on users.
Hey here's an idea--maybe somebody can use the APIs to recreate Flickr's old interface, and save it from itself...
Re:How quickly can they de-crap their products? (Score:5, Informative)
Look at gmail. Clean. Simple. Functional.
Well, with g-mails latest changes (admittedly a year old now), the question in my mind is whether yahoo can maintain status quo long enough for Google to shoot themselves in the foot by making their product more crappy.
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Just look at the new G-talk to Hangouts conversion. Big shot in the face there. I've talked to insiders and even they're irrate over the changes.. you know its bad when...
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Google would have to do some serious foot-shooting to make their product more crappy than Yahoo mail. Yes, Gmail's new UI sucks donkey balls, but it's nowhere near as bad as Yahoo's gaudy crap.
And why hasn't someone made some Greasemonkey script or extension to fix Gmail anyway? Surely it can be done somehow.
Re:How quickly can they de-crap their products? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dude, Firefox has worked as well as it always has. Just because its not your cup of tea doesn't make it crappy. One could say the same about IE if you really liked the product differentiation(I'd never, but I can understand the argument) then who am I to say differently.
Should we all go out and use Unity, Gnome3, Windows8 just because its new and shiny? No. We use what works for us, and if you don't like it then at least keep the smug to yourself.
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No, it is objectively worse than it used to be.
It is even worse than Unity, though I think Windows 8 beats them both.
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I liked firefox, but now its firechrome, cept not as slick ... so I just started using chrome since I fucking have to anyway as all the browsers are falling overthemselves to be just like chrome
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The newest versions of Firefox aren't horrible, but it got a bit rough a few versions back. I do wish they'd bring back the status bar though. Everything else has otherwise settled down into something fairly decent and quite usable.
Google, however, is settling into a "we are Google, we can do anything we want and you just have to suck it" mode. They're treating nobody well at this point, neither their customers nor their users. It's only a matter of time before somebody a bit nicer comes along and eats thei
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Status-4-evar is the addon you want. I installed in when forcibly upgraded to 10 (Ubuntu LTS stayed with 3.6 until it hit unsupported status). It's great. I for one can't understand why the removed it. And I can't understand at all why Safari on Mac doesn't even show the URL when you hover over a link. (It's not my Mac, fuck Apple with a chainsaw, but I do use it sometimes.)
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"Dude, Firefox has worked as well as it always has. Just because its not your cup of tea doesn't make it crappy."
I think the GP was referring to the fact that Firefox has seen a decline in marketshare in recent years, it not being his cup of tea may not make it crappy, but it actually being crappy is why people have flocked away from it to Chrome.
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I agree with the other poster. Goggle will fuck up gmail. They've already driven me from the web version. I predict they'd trash pop/imap access within six months either with much more intrusive adspam or just turning it off.
Re:Can Apple Actually Stage a Comeback? (Score:5, Interesting)
There's always an exception somewhere. Steve Jobs, love him or hate him, was a uniquely talented individual, and if Apple hadn't brought him back the way they did, they would indeed have died years ago. I seriously doubt this Marissa Mayer is this sort of uniquely talented person. Moreover, Apple has always had a bit of a cult around it due to the qualities of its products (remember, their whole goal was to make computers that regular people could use for work and everyday tasks, hence their extreme focus on UI and UX from way back when Jobs toured PARC). Yahoo doesn't have anything like this; its whole claim to fame was that it was a web portal back in the days before Google and search engines; essentially it started out as a giant web directory. This whole concept is totally obsolete now, so they tried to pitch themselves as a "front page" to the internet, but not many people care about that any more.
The only way I see them surviving is if they use the cash they still have and re-invent themselves into something different, mostly abandoning this "web portal" crap. I have no idea what that would be, however, and since really revolutionary ideas (like Facebook, Twitter, etc.) never come from large, established corporations, but rather from tiny start-ups, I think their days are very numbered.
Re:Can Apple Actually Stage a Comeback? (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree on all points. However, I don't know what I'm talking about, as results clearly show. Back in either 1998 or 2000 (my wife and disagree as to which party it was), I told a young grad student from Stanford that Yahoo was not only dominating, but would continue to dominate if they did nothing other than buy up all promising new web sites and technologies. This geek was dumb enough to work for stock as the first employee of a company founded by two professors -- yeah, like that ever works. Their big plan was taking on Yahoo and winning, when they had pretty much no capital and from what I could tell, no clue. I knew enough about decent marketing to know they'd be crushed by Yahoo's money. That kid was the first Google employee. So, take whatever I believe, for instance that Yahoo is now clearly doomed, and run the other way.
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Just to back up my point, in 1998, or 1999, I had my wife sell all her Apple stock and buy Red Hat. I could describe why I felt that was wise, but reality clearly proved me wrong. Can Yahoo turn around? I have to say I'd love to see it.
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Apple, back in 1998-1999, was on the brink of bankruptcy. Even the early years of Jobs return, Apple was putting out colorful plastic, underpowered computers. It wasn't until the introduction of the Ipod, and Apple's redirection into the consumer device market, did Apple dig itself out of its 1990's stupor.
Did reality prove you wrong? Hasn't the Red Hat stock grown in multiples of its 1990's value? Did she sell it in the early 2000's?
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Apple, back in 1998-1999, was on the brink of bankruptcy. Even the early years of Jobs return, Apple was putting out colorful plastic, underpowered computers. It wasn't until the introduction of the Ipod, and Apple's redirection into the consumer device market, did Apple dig itself out of its 1990's stupor.
Did reality prove you wrong? Hasn't the Red Hat stock grown in multiples of its 1990's value? Did she sell it in the early 2000's?
Red Hat had a stock value of 140 before the dot-com crash.... with the amount of stock then in circulation, this was utterly insane and it fell to 2-3 dollars before going up to the 10-20 range a couple of years later. Lately, it's been 50-60 so still needs more than a doubling to reach the old top.
The pricing back then was utterly insane, though...
Re:Can Apple Actually Stage a Comeback? (Score:4, Interesting)
No, because history shows that big corporations buying start-ups never turns out well. The big corp has no idea how to effectively use the new start-up, and its potential (assuming it had any) ends up being wasted.
Of course, most start-ups go nowhere too. But of those lucky few that succeed, we do get things like Google, Yahoo (back when they were successful), and Facebook (ugh).
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Are you actually trying to make a point somewhere?
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"More relevant: Can slashdot stage a comeback?"
NO, and if they don't revert their last design overhaul, I'm going to delete my account!
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"Reform the current operation before trying to graft on something else."
The need to start by firing everyone on the executive floor of the offices. the Board needs to hire all new blood that has a clue how to run a technology business.
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I looked recently and IIRC their stock is about back to where it was five years ago.
Re:YAHOO! ?? (Score:5, Informative)
i used it all the time. It used to have a human-submitted and maintained tree directory of the internet.
Think about that for a second.
So if I wanted to find a good website about DOS games, instead of googling for "DOS Games", I would go to Yahoo and select a top category. It might be "Entertainment".
And find subcategories, such as Games -> Computer Games -> Legacy Games -> DOS
And look through the listings.
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It worked for me in 1996. There was no Google for you to google back then. But around 98, I switched Altavista, that was the new hotness. It was kind of like a proto-google.
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Plus between trade secrets and accounting wonkery there's simply no way for anyone short of a spy behind a Bloomberg terminal to have an idea what'll happen.
In brief, this article is SOP for the Lobster [slashdot.org].
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Dating? Do they even still do that? I remember Yahoo Personals in the early-mid 2000s, but it was a disaster, because most of the "women" on there weren't real. They eventually shut it down, as I remember.
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Dating? Yea, I think the kids still do that. Not sure though.
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