The evaluation of “product killer” has always been well deserved.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “阑夕”(ID:techread ), the author of the evening.
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.
And Tumblr is actually just a daily case of this spell once again.
The most unfortunate thing to say is Flickr. This product is the best online photo album in the world, and has created a social sharing and label index design. It is regarded as the leading representative of “Web 2.0” by the industry. .
Yahoo acquired Flickr in 2005, and then Flickr fell to the naked eye until the new generation of users only recognized Instagram, and no one thought of sending photos to Flickr.
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 from $1.1 billion The amount has shrunk to the area of 3 million US dollars, most of the process is still completed during Yahoo’s tenure, this pot can not be removed.
Of course, even if it is the history of transaction failure, Yahoo is also a standout of surprise:
In 2002, Yahoo plans to acquire Google and open a price of 3 billion US dollars. Google’s two founders are almost Both hearted, and a $5 billion price, Yahoo decisively gave up;
In 2006, Yahoo said that it would like to buy Facebook for $1 billion, Zuckerberg would sign it, and Yahoo felt too smooth. Was it a loss, and the pressure on the spot was 850 million US dollars, and the Facebook board that was angered by the anger turned off the agreement;
In 2008, Microsoft with 40 billion dollars in cash, came up with a proposal to buy Yahoo! Yahoo felt that the money was too small. After a number of days of internal negotiations, he refused Microsoft. After a few years, Yahoo sold himself to Verizon for $4.6 billion.
发发The Internet company that is so stable is really the only one.
The founder of Y Combinator, the legendary investor of Silicon Valley, Paul Graham, acquired his startup in Yahoo in 1998. He also worked in Yahoo for a few years, and later he wrote A summary of the feelings of the same, recording the uniqueness of the Yahoo company.
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 is quite advanced, and later Google and other search engines have adopted 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 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 amazing commission. Let them go to P&G’s office building with impatience, and then bring back the multi-million dollar Banner advertising monthly contract. Compared with this profit model, Yahoo has no interest in improving efficiency through technology.
Graham also tried to persuade Yang to pay more attention to Google. If possible, he would enter the search market in the form of investment or mergers and acquisitions. “But there is a relationship between Yahoo’s executive team and the world’s objective truth. The most 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.”
格雷 Hamm 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”: It’s the engineer who writes the code, the product manager who thinks about the feature list and delivery date, the technical support staff who is telling the user to restart the browser, and so on—it’s exactly what a software company looks like.
So why should Yahoo call itself a “media company”?
One of the reasons is how they make money: advertising.
At the end of the twentieth century, it is hard to imagine a company that makes 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 is worried that it will be locked by Microsoft, so it wants to use ” The media company’s self-positioning is to avoid Microsoft.
However, if this positioning is just a strategy, maybe Yahoo is smart, but loaded, Yahoo gradually believes that it is not a technology company, but a company that sells advertising through technology products, it begins to put products The manager is called a “manufacturer” and the business unit is called an “asset.” No one really respects technology, and the company becomes 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.
“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 it. Work that is not valued, 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 probably had about 500 people. Later, when he went to visit Google. The latter’s staff size is also on this scale. It’s remarkable that Graham feels the cultural difference between the two companies:
“I dine with employees in Google’s canteen when discussing search When the results are optimized, almost all Google employees are thinking about and expressing the content of “What should I do?” But in Yahoo, you can’t hear such a voice, engineers will only work as required, and don’t care about it. Things outside.”