And despite the fact that the CEOs are all able to have like five different side hustles, they still get to drone on endlessly about how hard they work, and do not see the hypocrisy with making all the employees sign overly broad "non-competes".
Well, sure! We're untrustworthy plebes who would certainly drain company resources to support our "side hustles". The people who become CEOs are virtuous hyperperforming knights who always do everything right. /s
Probably the most trouble I got into when I was at Apple was when I emailed a VP directly asking if I could maybe contribute some code (in my own time, on my own hardware, at home) to an open source project.
The VP didn't just say "no", but also ratted me out to like the six managers between me and him, and each manager thought it was a good use of company time to schedule half-hour meetings explaining to me that I needed to go through the proper bureaucratic channels because the VP's time is "extremely valuable". Honestly kind of poisoned the entire job for me.
Apple made it pretty clear that they viewed pretty much any code that I wrote while I was employed by them, by default, belonged to them. If I contributed to an open source repo without legal's explicit approval, it was grounds for termination.
I've encountered this sort of clause in about 2/3 of the employment contracts I've been presented with. Every time, I object to it and request that it be removed and replaced with wording to the effect of "I won't use company time, resources, or information in side projects".
Every time I've done this, they've agreed to the change. If they don't, then I don't take the job.
Sounds like that happened a long time ago, my condolences. Non-competes don't mean shit and 99% of them in CA are illegal these days unless you are extremely high up (having 6 managers between you and a VP doesn't seem to satisfy that).
Hope you did it anyway. No one should be able to tell you what you can do in your spare time.
This was early 2020; is that a long time ago? Time has no meaning after COVID.
I mean, I wasn't worried about them suing me for contributing to open source (it would be pretty hard to prove any real damages), but I think being fired would have been on the table.
My wife basically made the Office Space joke when it happened, how I had like six half-hour meetings in one day to explain how I screwed up on some arbitrary rule.
Yeah, seriously. If you were in early with a hot company and that company hits hyperscale, people for some reason assume you're competent running a much larger legacy organization. I see very little parallels or overlap, but perhaps I'm blind.
Mayer was an engineer, and for some reason people thought she'd be a great CEO. Surprise, she wasn't.
We were told at Yahoo! that it was pointless to compete with Google and Microsoft at search because Yahoo! were not willing to put in the money to have their own search engine. At the time they were still the most popular webpage on the Internet. What really irritated me about this was the idea you could just look at a spreadsheet and decide if you'll be successful at search or anything else for that matter, startups constantly prove that resources don't automatically equal success... it sort of summed up the jail Yahoo! and Carol Bartz created and the thought process involved in that company's demise. MBAs have a lot to answer for IMO.
How do people deal with such poor leadership? One of the founders of Lucene worked at Yahoo for a time so Yahoo certainly could have done something distinctive in the search space.
You give feedback, they ignore it, and you leave. Most engineers don't want to spend their times fighting politics instead of doing their job. And if leadership doesn't have confidence in your job, why should you not seek a place that does? Not like there's really much employee retention factors these days.
Resources don't equal success, but both startups and incumbents need business plans: how they'll turn success into revenue.
I'm too young to remember, but was there a clear business plan supporting search at the time? Obviously Google has since proven that capturing a major chunk of the ad industry has made competing on search very worth it, but I don't remember if that was evident at the time. But I feel like the ad leverage came later in Google's life.
Then if you're trying to decide whether to bet on search at the time, the payoff may not be as evident without that insight.
It's far from guaranteed even then for the executives to have the skills necessary to determine who is best, or even qualified, within a given timescale of operational metrics.
I'm sure there's some alternative universe where Yahoo bought Netflix and ruined that instead. It's not that they bought the wrong company, it's that they just don't get it.
The exodus of technical staff when she came aboard was astonishing. There was something definitely wrong with Yahoo back then .... wait, there's STILL something really wrong with them.
Is Yahoo still Yahoo? Didn't Yahoo! have like a bunch of stocks in Alibaba, worth more than their actual business? So they sold the online "stuff" to Verizon and Yahoo Inc. became Altaba.
Through it's history Yahoo! had the opportunity to buy a lot of successful companies, but they lacked the foresight to do so and trusted too much in their existing business. For a brief period they did manage to attract really talented people though.
Douglas Crockford used to work there and several other JS programmers that were doing really interesting work. In a span of about 3 months they all left. I remember thinking WTH is going on there that they all bailed that quick?
Well, Yahoo bought Tumblr only, er, 10 years ago. Netflix had some great years since then and and my suspicion would be that Yahoo wouldn't have provided the investment needed to not be completely crushed by the competition.
Well that's true. I admit I didn't read the original article before posting and was thinking more of "Hm, I used to watch a lot of stuff on Netflix and now there just isn't anything that seems worth my time" as opposed to looking at the financial performance of those companies.
I don’t think you can really blame Netflix for the change in content over time. In the beginning nobody understood how big streaming would be so Netflix could license whatever for cheap. They were successful and everybody said “oh shit we need to build our own streaming service” so now we have this nightmare land of needing a bunch of different services to watch what you want.
Interesting. I'm not optimistic but I also wouldn't take that bet.
On one hand I don't think Twitter was ever profitable, so there's not much inventive to compete. But on the other hand, I don't think even Twitter can survive a decade of implosion. Bluesky may not be as big in 2030 as Twitter was at its peak, but if Twitter is legitimately dead it doesn't matter.
My cynical take is that microblogging also becomes a niche and "content creation" on Instagram/TikTok et. All takes over as refugees retrofit a different medium entirely to what they desire to do.
More mainstream relevant than Twitter will be in a decade? Seems inevitable. Even remotely as mainstream relevant as Twitter was in its heyday? I don't expect that to repeat, ever.
Twitter seems to be doing alright. I was a massive skeptic but a year on if I want to see live comments on something mainstream, it's 100% the only place to go. Tumblr is now owned by Automattic - I've no idea how well it's doing but I'm 99% sure that's because I'm no longer an angsty teenager and Tumblr was the place to be for that.
Twitter has gone completely to shit. My account was over 13 years old when I deleted it recently. The comments under any interesting post are dominated by blue check losers paying to get their idiot hot takes pushed to the top of the queue. It's a total shit show enough that I've given up 100% on posting and commenting and now only read occasionally with Blue Blocker active and doing my best to scroll down past the literal Nazis and Musk sycophants to replies from reasonable human beings. I go to Twitter like I go to the liquor store in an unfamiliar neighborhood, cautious, and in and out as quickly as I can.
That was my first thought as well. Yahoo's internal culture was already scrambled beyond real repair (at least not in any timeframe the board would have likely accepted) and any acquisition they made they would have bolloxed.
It occurs to me that the issue with broken incentive structures is that it allows the wrong people to rise to the top. Eventually the company is run by people that are good at getting into the positions that run the company, rather than those who are good at running the company. Switching CEOs doesn't fix this: they're still at the mercy of their executive team to implement their plans, and the existing executive team hold all the relationships with the people actually doing the work. New strategic visions don't fix this: they get implemented by the same people who are more concerned with preserving their place in the power structure than with actually delivering business value. You pretty much have to fire the entire executive team, everyone from VP level on up, and then replace them with the "magnets" from below - line managers, directors, and even ICs that are well-respected by rank & file but have no actual power.
I guess this is why they say a turnaround CEO's job is to "get the wrong people off the bus and the right people on the bus", and why "turnarounds seldom turn".
You bring up a very good point and HN is the best place to ask -- what are the correct incentive structures, what are some examples of companies that do the same?
I want to avoid making these mistakes for my startup.
Companies end up this way because they become large and bureaucratic. The distance between the customer's mouth and the business leaders' ears becomes too great, and filled with too much noise.
Every company, when starting out, tries to avoid going down this path (recall Google's "don't be evil" or Amazon's "it's always day 1") but they all eventually lose the spark, after becoming large enough.
Large companies who have lost this spark eventually start hiring consultants and agile coaches in a desperate gasp to regain it (much like estranged couples hiring marriage counselors). This usually goes about as well as you might expect.
I've never found a counterexample to this principle. I think the only real way to avoid it is to stay small.
It's not about becoming large and bureaucratic, that's a result, not the cause, in my opinion. It's the result of having a large enough footprint to require legal checks, it's the result of having lots of investors and shareholders meddling with how the company should function (since those are only interested in ROI, and as fast as possible).
When a company gives out its control to 3rd parties that are not involved in what the company does, and only cares about financial statements, it loses its spark. Not because they decided to lose it but that's how the market forces act: squeeze out as much as possible, for as little as possible, and call it a good day.
The only counterpoint to that phenomenon is what some large-ish private companies do: stay private, don't get investment from external investors who haven't bought into what the company is providing as value to society, don't get investment from people looking to make their money 2-10x in a short period of time (short being around 10 years).
The moment a company enters squarely into the current financial markets it's doomed to just become a carcass of whatever vision it had, it's now just another commodity.
Edit: and every startup founder wants to be different and not fall for this, I don't think many manage, after some rounds of investment it's not in your power anymore to decide that, your VCs and other members in the cap table control you.
"Silicon Valley" is such good satire exactly because it depicts almost exactly how that happens.
It seems it does happens some times, but requires outside intervention. Usually in the form of lost value. For example Microsoft seems to be doing much better today after botching just about everything for 10+ years.
As people here are (or should be) well aware: any system can be gamed. You can never outsource all of your diligence to a set of rules. Thinking that this must be possible is folly. Important hiring decisions can't be automated. Scaling ladders neither. And don't overestimate the quality of your hiring/promotion decisions while you're at it: you suck at it and so does everyone else.
What kind of people do you want to thrive, and what do you want your business to do?
The problems start when you have outside investors.
The worst problems happen with a public listing. Your biggest shareholders will be fund managers. They are judged by how well they do in annual rankings. Their incentive is to make the share price go up over the next few months.
The only way to avoid it is to stay private.
Financial incentive structures are very hard to get right. People will always find ways of gaming the metrics.
I think that one challenge is that the proper incentive structure changes as the company grows and matures.
Google's biggest problem c. 2004 was that the suite of opportunities available to it on the Internet was far more than it had skilled employees to capitalize on. So they enshrined "leadership" and "influence" into their performance review system. You got promoted first for showing that you had the independence to tackle complex problems on your own; then that you could lead a team of people to tackle an even more complex problem; then that you could train others on how to lead teams of people; then that you identify the next set of complex new problems worth tackling; and so on. Worked great as long as the Internet was a big growth opportunity with lots of virgin undiscovered territory. But then when all the basic problems users care about are solved, how do you get promoted? Well, first you have to cancel a product that's working well. Now you have a big glaring complex problem that needs to be solved, so all your people can get promoted, move off the project, and then it can be canceled for the next cohort of promotions. And so on, until the only skillsets that company leaders have are "canceling products" and "creating technical debt".
Google basically built a pyramid scheme into their performance management system.
The thing is, this incentive system works on the level of the whole economy itself. There were plenty of companies (and open-source projects!) that did not build a pyramid scheme into their incentives. LiveJournal. OpenID. Semantic Web. RSS. PubSubHubbub. Bittorrent. Freenode. Where are they now? Well, they didn't build a pyramid scheme into their incentives, so they got out-grown by companies like Google and Meta that did. And this pattern extends back at least to the Industrial Revolution. Why do we have unsustainable car-centric suburbs based on polluting fossil fuels? Well, that technology grew faster than alternatives and then used their newfound wealth and customer base to convince cities to dismantle their trolley lines.
Real question: what's your exit strategy for your startup?
If the exit strategy is to get acquired, don't worry about it. You will make money and get to leave before the mess begins.
If your goal is to go public, it's almost guaranteed that you will end up in this situation eventually. Most of the corporate insanity is driven by public company antics and having to show growth every quarter.
The two examples I think of when I try to come up with "companies that don't suck" are Patagonia and REI. Both are private. In the case of Patagonia, the founder has spoken out against the quest for growth as it's a driver of so many bad things. I don't know much about REI but I'm sure if they went public quality would go downhill as well.
You are either serving people or serving Wall St - in my experience it's not possible to serve both.
Companies that are large and do badly look at "assets" the same way ticks look at mammals: "Let's suck the blood out of it". They kill the Golden Goose. The people that want to build and optimize are moved where they can suck more blood / kill it faster.
I argue that is the same with tech. Most of these companies are full of people who know how to get hired and get promoted, without actually doing anything, or knowing anything. This is even more so with large companies built in the early 2000s.
Obviously these companies run, but it’s all done by maybe 10% of the workforce who actually knows what they are doing.
The more reflective and insightful thing for her to say would have been she shouldn't have taken the job at Yahoo! for this reason. Anyone can look back at investments they considered and say they should have bought the one that did well.
chuckle I had Apple stock pre iPhone. What did I have to do in order to be rich? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. If I would have just quit working, hung out on a beach, and not sold any Apple stock, I would have made far more money than anything I have done since.
:) they do. And if I could go back, I'd do it all again. A father's role is to provide the opportunities, and that obligation does not go away even if you know your kids won't take full advantage of them.
She needs to do something impressive then. It's hard to count her time at early Google as a real example of her genius, unless the argument is that literally every employee there was a supergenius somehow.
After failing to do anything interesting, and getting a quarter of a billion dollars from Yahoo, she is now pushing some kind of smart phone contacts thing with AI.
Yahoo Screen was an impressively bad product but that show was great. I remember ads legitimately interrupting the middle of a scene (not clearly designed ad break) and when the ad finished, the show didn't even resume where it left off. It was {ad length} seconds later as if the show kept going in the background and then you'd have to rewind.
They also had a service called Yahoo! Music that showed currently popular music videos. I thought it was cool at the time. I remember watching it during my senior year of college, in 2005-2006. Shortly after I graduated, I heard about another video site called YouTube. I wonder what ever became of that one!
Tumblr is not NSFW content friendly, which is a slippery slope. I don't want my edgy meme taken down or censored, I would much rather run my own server that I control and having it not subject to arbitrary value judgements about what I post.
I'm imagining the pitch. "So there's this popular blogging website, it has millions of users that we can onboard as a channel for our other properties, probable ARPU across integrations in high double digits per year. There's just one thing though, they hate everything. Yeah, literally everything. I don't actually know what that means or how it's possible, but it's millions of users and we pay product managers to figure this stuff out, we're thinking a round number like a billion, it sends all the right signals..."
But man am I glad they didn't. I'm pretty sure it would have killed Netflix. At that time, a lot of the senior eng managers at Netflix were ex-Yahoo. They had left for a reason.
Tumblr could have been a great purchase and kept Yahoo relevant today but they ruined it, and I mean with multiple compounding changes not just the explicit content ban.
I think Ms Mayer was, and always will be, an incompetent leader. Tumblr was a cool website with potential and Yahoo leadership at the time could not figure out what to do with it.
I see Mozilla management and keep thinking of Yahoo! Wasting limited resources while the clock is ticking on useless side projects and neglecting your raison d’etre. Having no sense of purpose or central plan.
Well... Mayer was running Yahoo into the ground, so I'm not sure whether her retrospective beliefs are worth anything. Yahoo already tried doing their own original content and failed at it. I don't see how a Netflix acquisition by Yahoo would have done anything but plummet Netflix.
What Yahoo should have done was try to capitalize on the growing negative sentiment against The Google, social media, and Big Tech in general. By that I mean that Yahoo should have revamped itself to be privacy-oriented. This wouldn't be easy to pull off since Yahoo was (still is?) an advertising firm, but at this point they don't suffer the reputation of The Google in terms of having so much data that they "know what you want before you know it." So, for instance, Yahoo Mail should have been retooled to use end-to-end encryption and promised to never read your emails or share with third parties. Yahoo Search should have essentially become what Kagi is today; a search engine that gives power back to the user. Yahoo News should have been taken off the homepage and scoped exclusively to the News section unless the user opts-in to keeping the news one the homepage. Their news product should also have tried to distance itself from being a chum bucket of celebrity gossip and legacy entertainment news (today they still forward Buzzfeed articles for cripes sake). Yahoo made one semi-decent move with LastPass Premium being a part of Yahoo Plus Secure, but the problem here is that LastPass is fraught with controversy, and it's a product that's more or less tacked on to the Yahoo brand rather than being a true part of it. No one wants a glorified trial for some software that may no longer be offered through Yahoo someday.
Would these changes have meant that Yahoo would maximize their profit? Certainly not, at least not in the beginning. However, it would give them a chance to become relevant and grow in the long term. Of course, I don't believe they're ever going to do that. They have been experiencing late-stage corporatism for most of their existence, and that's not going to change without getting rid of all the clowns from the C-level.
Everything about Yahoo for most of its existence screams design by corporate committee. Their ecosystem is in a better shape than it was, but it's still baffling just how safe they want to play everything. Their whole site screams Web 1.0 but without any of the Web 1.0 charm. Making Yahoo Mail a safe haven from the likes of Gmail would have been such an obvious win, in my opinion. Yet the former CEO of Yahoo thinks they would have been better off buying a company that succeeds an area where Yahoo proves to have sucked hard at?
I remember a Cringely column around the time Mayer took over suggesting Yahoo's best strategy would be simply to invest in a large number of startups in early funding rounds, i.e. not expensive unicorns.
106 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadThe VP didn't just say "no", but also ratted me out to like the six managers between me and him, and each manager thought it was a good use of company time to schedule half-hour meetings explaining to me that I needed to go through the proper bureaucratic channels because the VP's time is "extremely valuable". Honestly kind of poisoned the entire job for me.
It was ridiculous.
Every time I've done this, they've agreed to the change. If they don't, then I don't take the job.
Hope you did it anyway. No one should be able to tell you what you can do in your spare time.
I mean, I wasn't worried about them suing me for contributing to open source (it would be pretty hard to prove any real damages), but I think being fired would have been on the table.
Mayer was an engineer, and for some reason people thought she'd be a great CEO. Surprise, she wasn't.
Wasn't she really disliked within Yahoo!?
At least I could crash the company without costing the company hundreds of millions.
You would think that kills a company, but a big company can survive decades in that mode, just slowly riding the elevator all the way down.
By the way, after co-founding Jakarta, I was the one who brought him and Lucene into the ASF and the rest is history.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Cutting
I'm too young to remember, but was there a clear business plan supporting search at the time? Obviously Google has since proven that capturing a major chunk of the ad industry has made competing on search very worth it, but I don't remember if that was evident at the time. But I feel like the ad leverage came later in Google's life.
Then if you're trying to decide whether to bet on search at the time, the payoff may not be as evident without that insight.
Through it's history Yahoo! had the opportunity to buy a lot of successful companies, but they lacked the foresight to do so and trusted too much in their existing business. For a brief period they did manage to attract really talented people though.
You're objectively incorrect in that opinion. They just reported 247M global paid memberships. Highest they've ever had.
Objectively Yahoo is worth $27.32 Billion USD, 1/7th as much as Netflix.
Watching Tumbler and Twitter die because individuals essentially decided they didn't want us to have them anymore has been informative.
Tumblr yeah. The general format of traditional blogging was already in trouble and Yahoo simply chopped off what that audience appreciated.
On one hand I don't think Twitter was ever profitable, so there's not much inventive to compete. But on the other hand, I don't think even Twitter can survive a decade of implosion. Bluesky may not be as big in 2030 as Twitter was at its peak, but if Twitter is legitimately dead it doesn't matter.
My cynical take is that microblogging also becomes a niche and "content creation" on Instagram/TikTok et. All takes over as refugees retrofit a different medium entirely to what they desire to do.
I guess this is why they say a turnaround CEO's job is to "get the wrong people off the bus and the right people on the bus", and why "turnarounds seldom turn".
I want to avoid making these mistakes for my startup.
Every company, when starting out, tries to avoid going down this path (recall Google's "don't be evil" or Amazon's "it's always day 1") but they all eventually lose the spark, after becoming large enough.
Large companies who have lost this spark eventually start hiring consultants and agile coaches in a desperate gasp to regain it (much like estranged couples hiring marriage counselors). This usually goes about as well as you might expect.
I've never found a counterexample to this principle. I think the only real way to avoid it is to stay small.
When a company gives out its control to 3rd parties that are not involved in what the company does, and only cares about financial statements, it loses its spark. Not because they decided to lose it but that's how the market forces act: squeeze out as much as possible, for as little as possible, and call it a good day.
The only counterpoint to that phenomenon is what some large-ish private companies do: stay private, don't get investment from external investors who haven't bought into what the company is providing as value to society, don't get investment from people looking to make their money 2-10x in a short period of time (short being around 10 years).
The moment a company enters squarely into the current financial markets it's doomed to just become a carcass of whatever vision it had, it's now just another commodity.
Edit: and every startup founder wants to be different and not fall for this, I don't think many manage, after some rounds of investment it's not in your power anymore to decide that, your VCs and other members in the cap table control you.
"Silicon Valley" is such good satire exactly because it depicts almost exactly how that happens.
What kind of people do you want to thrive, and what do you want your business to do?
The worst problems happen with a public listing. Your biggest shareholders will be fund managers. They are judged by how well they do in annual rankings. Their incentive is to make the share price go up over the next few months.
The only way to avoid it is to stay private.
Financial incentive structures are very hard to get right. People will always find ways of gaming the metrics.
Google's biggest problem c. 2004 was that the suite of opportunities available to it on the Internet was far more than it had skilled employees to capitalize on. So they enshrined "leadership" and "influence" into their performance review system. You got promoted first for showing that you had the independence to tackle complex problems on your own; then that you could lead a team of people to tackle an even more complex problem; then that you could train others on how to lead teams of people; then that you identify the next set of complex new problems worth tackling; and so on. Worked great as long as the Internet was a big growth opportunity with lots of virgin undiscovered territory. But then when all the basic problems users care about are solved, how do you get promoted? Well, first you have to cancel a product that's working well. Now you have a big glaring complex problem that needs to be solved, so all your people can get promoted, move off the project, and then it can be canceled for the next cohort of promotions. And so on, until the only skillsets that company leaders have are "canceling products" and "creating technical debt".
Google basically built a pyramid scheme into their performance management system.
The thing is, this incentive system works on the level of the whole economy itself. There were plenty of companies (and open-source projects!) that did not build a pyramid scheme into their incentives. LiveJournal. OpenID. Semantic Web. RSS. PubSubHubbub. Bittorrent. Freenode. Where are they now? Well, they didn't build a pyramid scheme into their incentives, so they got out-grown by companies like Google and Meta that did. And this pattern extends back at least to the Industrial Revolution. Why do we have unsustainable car-centric suburbs based on polluting fossil fuels? Well, that technology grew faster than alternatives and then used their newfound wealth and customer base to convince cities to dismantle their trolley lines.
If the exit strategy is to get acquired, don't worry about it. You will make money and get to leave before the mess begins.
If your goal is to go public, it's almost guaranteed that you will end up in this situation eventually. Most of the corporate insanity is driven by public company antics and having to show growth every quarter.
The two examples I think of when I try to come up with "companies that don't suck" are Patagonia and REI. Both are private. In the case of Patagonia, the founder has spoken out against the quest for growth as it's a driver of so many bad things. I don't know much about REI but I'm sure if they went public quality would go downhill as well.
You are either serving people or serving Wall St - in my experience it's not possible to serve both.
Don't do that.
Obviously these companies run, but it’s all done by maybe 10% of the workforce who actually knows what they are doing.
If she turns around Twitter despite Musk's involvement, she'll be deified by MBAs everywhere.
After failing to do anything interesting, and getting a quarter of a billion dollars from Yahoo, she is now pushing some kind of smart phone contacts thing with AI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff
https://www.emergingtechbrew.com/stories/2023/05/04/marissa-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Space
https://watchdust.com/otherspace
Wow that just drips frat house product manager!
If true, that smells like a root cause for how bad Mayer is at running tech.
What Yahoo should have done was try to capitalize on the growing negative sentiment against The Google, social media, and Big Tech in general. By that I mean that Yahoo should have revamped itself to be privacy-oriented. This wouldn't be easy to pull off since Yahoo was (still is?) an advertising firm, but at this point they don't suffer the reputation of The Google in terms of having so much data that they "know what you want before you know it." So, for instance, Yahoo Mail should have been retooled to use end-to-end encryption and promised to never read your emails or share with third parties. Yahoo Search should have essentially become what Kagi is today; a search engine that gives power back to the user. Yahoo News should have been taken off the homepage and scoped exclusively to the News section unless the user opts-in to keeping the news one the homepage. Their news product should also have tried to distance itself from being a chum bucket of celebrity gossip and legacy entertainment news (today they still forward Buzzfeed articles for cripes sake). Yahoo made one semi-decent move with LastPass Premium being a part of Yahoo Plus Secure, but the problem here is that LastPass is fraught with controversy, and it's a product that's more or less tacked on to the Yahoo brand rather than being a true part of it. No one wants a glorified trial for some software that may no longer be offered through Yahoo someday.
Would these changes have meant that Yahoo would maximize their profit? Certainly not, at least not in the beginning. However, it would give them a chance to become relevant and grow in the long term. Of course, I don't believe they're ever going to do that. They have been experiencing late-stage corporatism for most of their existence, and that's not going to change without getting rid of all the clowns from the C-level.
Everything about Yahoo for most of its existence screams design by corporate committee. Their ecosystem is in a better shape than it was, but it's still baffling just how safe they want to play everything. Their whole site screams Web 1.0 but without any of the Web 1.0 charm. Making Yahoo Mail a safe haven from the likes of Gmail would have been such an obvious win, in my opinion. Yet the former CEO of Yahoo thinks they would have been better off buying a company that succeeds an area where Yahoo proves to have sucked hard at?
I just don't get it.
https://www.cringely.com/2014/09/30/one-way-maybe-way-yahoo-...
and follow up 2 yrs later:
https://www.cringely.com/2016/07/26/15343/
¯\_(ツ)_/¯