OT: How did Yahoo get so bad

[rugbysecondrow]

Little by little, it seems Yahoo has gotten worse. It is hard to navigate, it is a cluttered front page that is slow loading and laden with junk. I reminds me of how AOL ened up. I use it only for fantasy sports and the occasional group page, but it is otherwise worthless. It is too bad because I think they had a strong product for a while.

My question is, how did it get so bad? For me, it started when their email when to crap. When that happended, everything else seemed to follow.

[AngryScientist]

agree, and i just made the leap to really stop using yahoo mail now, which i've been using for a decade, it saddens me.

i used to use yahoo as my home page too, it was great for weather, and other current events stuff. its pretty bad now, they seem to literally run the same 10 articles with a slightly different spin day after day. how many times can the "top 10 cities in the US" be on the front page?? i rarely go to the yahoo page anymore.

how did it get so bad? good question, i would imagine the staff is just not very good, and not very well paid. the best and the brightest, the innovators of the web are likely all somewhere else, working on more exciting projects, cutting edge stuff.

RIP yahoo.

[zap]

Short answer, lack of visionary leadership.

Tough to have a maturing sizeable firm with procedures in place for day to day operations yet still have a place where something special, outside the box thinking, happens.

Google has been able to meet the challenge to date but lets see how the recent change at the top plays out.

[FlashUNC]

Yahoo's main problem, as I see it, is that Google took everything they used to do, and now do it better.

News? Easy to find. E-mail? No contest. Search? Forget about it.

Yahoo's death knell, in my mind, was when Google announced free, multi-gigabyte storage space for email.

Everything else is just waiting around for the end at this point...

[Charles M]

It's really a dollars thing...


The very best web sights always get that way because they do something EXTREMELY well... People go there for a service that is original, beneficial and easy.

They become an attractive place for invenstors... They get "hot". Then one of a couple of things seem to happen to all but a very few.

-The sell out.

-They sell in... The massive push from the inflated investment dollars buys a big managment structure and everybody on the top floor sets a goal of making money off of every square inch of the place and or the site is so popular they feel like all of their ideas are just as revolutionary as the thing that brought them to the dance...


Its the same with most service web stops. Being able to buy popularity on search engines instead of people finding the best things is a great example. The clutter at Yahoo is another.

Watching what happens to facebook will be entertaining as hell...


Not sure I blame em though. virtually no company will look past the money that going public or selling in can bring. Those companies would have died (and their leaders never cashed in) had they not taken the paths they've taken.

[Ahneida Ride]

Innovate or Perish ... the only safe gig is to create $ outa nothing

[benb]

That really crappy content that Yahoo is putting on their home page turns out to be really profitable. AOL is another example of a company that is doing it.

It seems like serious journalism doesn't pay because it just doesn't pop up in Google search results, whereas garbage seems to float to the top. So if they want to be "serious" it's almost like they have to balance the crap with the good to have enough money to pay for real journalism.

A bunch of these big companies are really flirting with the "content farms" that Google has had so much trouble blocking.

On top of that if you listen/read much in the tech press they have been hammering the CEO of yahoo for years as a really bad manager, and constantly saying it's become a horrible place to work and all the quality engineers have fled and/or are fleeing and the place is overrun with middle managers.

I'm not in SV so this is just what I've read/heard but the other thing is major brain drain at both Yahoo and Google as engineers flee to startups, facebook, twitter, etc..

[old_fat_and_slow]

Innovate or Perish ... the only safe gig is to create $ outa nothing

I think internet porn is still a pretty safe bet to make money. It was the first industry to turn a profit on the internet, and is probably still raking in money hand over fist. World doesn't seem to be running low on horn-dogs looking for a cheap thrill.

[54ny77]

funny you should mention that.

i used to only use yahoo since it first came out.

google was some weird thing, its 1 box search simplicity seemed foreign...

...and at some point, yahoo became cluttered with more crap than most roadside sections of I-95.

haven't used yahoo for any search in at least 4-5 years. :)

[fiamme red]

I use Google for searches, Yahoo for e-mail. I've also used gmail, and I think that Yahoo e-mail is fine. What's wrong with it?

[avalonracing]

I think internet porn is still a pretty safe bet to make money. It was the first industry to turn a profit on the internet, and is probably still raking in money hand over fist. World doesn't seem to be running low on horn-dogs looking for a cheap thrill.


What is this internet porn that you speak of? To find out I will spend the rest of the day and most the weekend researching it.

[rugbysecondrow]

What is this internet porn that you speak of? To find out I will spend the rest of the day and most the weekend researching it.

If you do, you might not be able to ride the bike for a few days.

[sg8357]

Yahoo went out with Windows98.

e-mail was last seen with Windows Vista.

[MadRocketSci]

Short answer, lack of visionary leadership.

Tough to have a maturing sizeable firm with procedures in place for day to day operations yet still have a place where something special, outside the box thinking, happens.

Google has been able to meet the challenge to date but lets see how the recent change at the top plays out.

i do not have high hopes for larry page, but maybe he will surprise me...

also not quite sure what is so great about marissa mayer...

[Ahneida Ride]

I think internet porn is still a pretty safe bet to make money. It was the first industry to turn a profit on the internet, and is probably still raking in money hand over fist. World doesn't seem to be running low on horn-dogs looking for a cheap thrill.

I stand corrected. Porn and fractional non reserve banking.

[uno-speedo]

You can customize the yahoo home page to contain what content you want to see. Be it weather, sports, stocks etc., etc.

But I moved on and am now using Gmail.