This article comes from the public number (ID: techread), author Yu Xi, Ai Faner authorized release.

Yahoo is really a magical company. Throughout its life from the rise to becoming a giant until the micro-package, the “product killer” evaluation has always been well deserved.

What do you mean, no matter how arrogant the product is, if it is acquired by Yahoo, it will quickly fade away from the aura and become “all in all”, without exception.

Tumblr is nothing more than a daily routine of this spell.

The most unfortunate thing is Flickr, which is the world’s best online photo album, and has created a social sharing and tag index design, and is regarded as the leading representative of “Web 2.0” by the industry.

Yahoo acquired Flickr in 2005, and then Flickr fell at a rate that was visible to the naked eye, until the new generation of users only recognized Instagram, and few people thought of sending photos to Flickr.

There is also the originator of online bookmarks. Delicious, the earliest search engine tyrant Altavista, blog hosting service MyBloglog, etc., all sold out by Yahoo and disappeared, and finally it is not shutting down or selling.

Tumblr is another violent work, although the Yahoo company is no longer there – the current main business is the acquisition of Yahoo’s US telecom operator Verizon – but Tumblr has shrunk from $1.1 billion. To the district of 3 million US dollars, most of the process was completed during Yahoo’s tenure, this pot can not be removed.

Of course, even if it is the history of trading failures, Yahoo is also a standout of surprises:

In 2002, Yahoo planned to acquire Google and opened a $3 billion price tag. Google’s two founders were almost heart-warming, and a $5 billion price, Yahoo decided to give up;

In 2006, Yahoo said that it would like to buy Facebook for $1 billion. Zuckerberg had to sign it. Yahoo thought it was too smooth. Didn’t he suffer, and the price was 850 million dollars, and the Facebook board was torn away by the anger. Agreement;

In 2008, Microsoft brought in $40 billion in cash and made a proposal for a wholly-owned acquisition of Yahoo. Yahoo felt that the money was too small and the internal discussions were for many days.After rejecting Microsoft, and after a few years, Yahoo sold himself to Verizon for $4.6 billion.

To play such a stable Internet company, it is really the only one.

The founder of Y Combinator, the legendary investor of Silicon Valley, Paul Graham, was acquired by Yahoo in 1998. He also worked with Yahoo for a few years. Later he wrote a similar experience. In summary, it records the uniqueness of Yahoo!

Graham first met Yang Zhiyuan, who introduced the technology he was developing, similar to the auction ordering algorithm, which allowed website ads to automatically display the highest bidding content, but in 1998, this design It was quite advanced, and later Google and other search engines used this algorithm.

However, Yang Zhiyuan was not interested at all after listening to it – in Graham’s words, there was a “Poker Face” from beginning to end – Graham realized it later, that is Yahoo does not care about the “maximization of traffic value”.

Because at the time of the dot-com bubble of the Internet bubble, advertisers madly advertised to the site, and its premium has far exceeded the actual value of the advertising space, so Yang Zhiyuan can give the sales team an amazingly high commission, so that they are in a good position. Visiting P&G’s office building and then bringing back the multi-million dollar Banner monthly contract, compared to this profit model, Yahoo has no interest in improving efficiency through technology.

Graham also tried to convince Yang Zhiyuan to pay more attention to Google. If possible, he would enter the search market in the form of investment or mergers and acquisitions. “However, Yahoo’s executive team and the world’s objective truth have the most The opaque wall is money. As long as customers continue to pay for high-priced advertising, then Yahoo! people will never think they need to do something else.”

Graham said that he was sometimes confused when he was at Yahoo. Yahoo insisted that he was a “media company”, but if you walk around the office, you will find that it is more like a “software company”: The workstations are all engineers who write code, product managers who think about feature lists and delivery dates, and technical support staff who are telling users to restart the browser—all in a software company.

So why should Yahoo call itself a “media company”?

One of the reasons

is the way they make money: advertising.

At the end of the twentieth century, it was hard for anyone to imagine a company making money by advertising. In people’s minds, the main business of technology companies is software, and the main business of media companies is advertising. Therefore, they think they must be a “media company.”

Another reason is that Yahoo is very afraid of Microsoft, after witnessing the famous Netscape because it was defeated by Microsoft as the number one competitor, Yahoo!I am worried that Microsoft will be locked in, so I want to use the “media company” self-positioning to avoid Microsoft.

However, if this positioning is just a strategy, maybe Yahoo is smart, but loaded, Yahoo gradually believes that he is not a technology company, but a company that sells advertising through technology products. I started to call the product manager “manufacturer” and the business unit “asset”. No one really respects technology, and the company has become non-negligible.

The worst impact of trying to be a “media company” is that they don’t take programming seriously enough. Microsoft, Google and Facebook all pursue a “hacker culture,” but Yahoo just uses programming as a “commodity.” At Yahoo, the software that is directly user-oriented is the responsibility of the project manager. The job of the engineer is to “translate” the requirements of the project manager into code.

“And the product is not good enough is not the worst consequence of Yahoo! The worst thing is that it makes it difficult to attract excellent technical talents. Engineers with dignity will not be willing to condescend to Yahoo to do not pay attention. The work, once the quality of talents declines, the company’s environment will deteriorate, and finally fall into a vicious circle.”

When Graham was at Yahoo, Yahoo had about 500 people. When he went to visit Google, the latter’s staff was just on the order of magnitude. It’s remarkable that Graham felt the two companies’ Cultural differences:

“I dine with employees in Google’s canteen. When discussing topics that are optimized for search results, almost all Google employees are thinking and expressing “What should I do”, but you can’t hear it at Yahoo! Such a voice, engineers will only work as required, and do not care about things outside the requirements.”