Yahoo Chief: ‘We Have Never Been a Search Company’(bits.blogs.nytimes.com)
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
Yahoo Chief: ‘We Have Never Been a Search Company’
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/07/yahoo-ceo-we-have-never-been-a-search-company/?ref=technology
11 comments
Seems like Yahoo! is starting to regain some goodwill. Maybe developers will also start to realise how insanely awesome their APIs are.
http://developer.yahoo.com/everything.html
http://developer.yahoo.com/everything.html
I've always wondered why jQuery (and prototype) are the default javascript libraries for many people. The YUI library is fast, featureful, and maintained by some of the best JS devs in the industry (sorry resig, but I think Crockford knows a little bit more about JS than you).
Is it because Yahoo! isn't a "cool" company? Is it because RoR is so tightly coupled to prototype? Is it because they had kind of an unwieldy namespace before they updated that?
I find their XHR, event, and dom manipulation interfaces much easier to work with than prototype or jQuery - these are good until you need to do some serious heavy lifting. I've had several instances where I had to create XHRs manually because prototype just didn't give me the access I needed.
Is it because Yahoo! isn't a "cool" company? Is it because RoR is so tightly coupled to prototype? Is it because they had kind of an unwieldy namespace before they updated that?
I find their XHR, event, and dom manipulation interfaces much easier to work with than prototype or jQuery - these are good until you need to do some serious heavy lifting. I've had several instances where I had to create XHRs manually because prototype just didn't give me the access I needed.
Crockford doesn't work on YUI - but he does work at Yahoo. I will fully concede that he may know more about ECMAScript than me - but I will happily challenge him on JavaScript + DOM any day :-)
Quite seriously though, since jQuery and YUI came out at nearly the same time back in early 2006 - I feel that it has to do with the simplicity of the jQuery API and the active community that's grown around jQuery. YUI has always had better documentation (even though jQuery's has been good), so that can't be it.
A couple points:
- You can always do more complicated work with simple APIs but it's fundamentally harder to do simple work with more complex APIs.
- YUI didn't promote external plugins or development communities. For example the ExtJS library that grew up based upon YUI was left to stagnate and grow on its own rather than become part of YUI itself. If the YUI team worked to bring Jack Slocum on board YUI would be in a much more dominant position than what it is now.
- YUI has been closed to outside contributions for most of its life. No bug tracker, no outside patches, etc. It's only recently that they've truly Open Sourced both the code and the process surrounding the library.
I do find it to be odd, as well - YUI really should be more popular than it is. It's well written, well documented, and is well maintained. Even after all of that its market share is shrinking.
http://google.com/trends?q=jquery+javascript%2C+yui+javascri...
Quite seriously though, since jQuery and YUI came out at nearly the same time back in early 2006 - I feel that it has to do with the simplicity of the jQuery API and the active community that's grown around jQuery. YUI has always had better documentation (even though jQuery's has been good), so that can't be it.
A couple points:
- You can always do more complicated work with simple APIs but it's fundamentally harder to do simple work with more complex APIs.
- YUI didn't promote external plugins or development communities. For example the ExtJS library that grew up based upon YUI was left to stagnate and grow on its own rather than become part of YUI itself. If the YUI team worked to bring Jack Slocum on board YUI would be in a much more dominant position than what it is now.
- YUI has been closed to outside contributions for most of its life. No bug tracker, no outside patches, etc. It's only recently that they've truly Open Sourced both the code and the process surrounding the library.
I do find it to be odd, as well - YUI really should be more popular than it is. It's well written, well documented, and is well maintained. Even after all of that its market share is shrinking.
http://google.com/trends?q=jquery+javascript%2C+yui+javascri...
> If the YUI team worked to bring Jack Slocum on board
> YUI would be in a much more dominant position than
> what it is now.
You may know more about it than I do, but at the time, it seemed like Eric Miraglia did try to bring Jack on board, but for some reason it wasn't a good fit.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ydn-javascript/message/94...
HTH, Ted.
You may know more about it than I do, but at the time, it seemed like Eric Miraglia did try to bring Jack on board, but for some reason it wasn't a good fit.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ydn-javascript/message/94...
HTH, Ted.
I've been building checkers to learn jquery. firebug enabled + red moves first:
http://notsquidnote.com/checkers/checkers.html
http://notsquidnote.com/checkers/checkers.html
Have you considered posting it to a site like http://refactormycode.com/ ? You're more likely to get feedback there. I posted once and I got good feedback right away.
http://refactormycode.com/codes/826-monthly-calendar-library
http://refactormycode.com/codes/826-monthly-calendar-library
In my experience, it's because the YUI framework is 30Mb with docs, 10Mb without. If I need 10Mb of support tools to make my app do cool stuff, I feel like I'm leaning too much on the framework, and too little on my own capabilities.
Except you can pick and choose. If all you want is the dom-util-event stuff, it's 36KB unminified. That's the core, and it gets you more features and a more sane API than the 32KB unminified prototype.js.
Of course, adding animation on adds weight in both libraries. Tacking on scriptaculous core + effects tacks on an additional 44kb. Tacking on YUI's animation and effects package tacks on 48KB of more featureful and sane API. If you want the entire (slow, buggy, and not very cross-platform) scriptaculous library loaded, prepare to load up 156KB.
tl;dr: unminified, YUI-dom-event + animation is 84KB unminified. Prototype + Scriptaculous is 76KB unminified. YUI is faster, has a more sane API, more features, doesn't pollute the global namespace, and doesn't insanely swallow and mute errors.
Oh, yeah, and it has better API documentation....
(sidenote: YUI framework is 10mb without docs, but that includes: minified, unminified, unit tests, and a metric shit-ton [technical term] of plugins. Of course, if you're going with prototype or jQuery, you've got to scour the 'net looking for plugins that do the same thing. They come packaged with YUI.)
Of course, adding animation on adds weight in both libraries. Tacking on scriptaculous core + effects tacks on an additional 44kb. Tacking on YUI's animation and effects package tacks on 48KB of more featureful and sane API. If you want the entire (slow, buggy, and not very cross-platform) scriptaculous library loaded, prepare to load up 156KB.
tl;dr: unminified, YUI-dom-event + animation is 84KB unminified. Prototype + Scriptaculous is 76KB unminified. YUI is faster, has a more sane API, more features, doesn't pollute the global namespace, and doesn't insanely swallow and mute errors.
Oh, yeah, and it has better API documentation....
(sidenote: YUI framework is 10mb without docs, but that includes: minified, unminified, unit tests, and a metric shit-ton [technical term] of plugins. Of course, if you're going with prototype or jQuery, you've got to scour the 'net looking for plugins that do the same thing. They come packaged with YUI.)
Look at Pig's docs compared to Hive's... Yahoo is amazing to the FOSS community and deserves mucho goodwill.
Hallelujah! Thank you.
Well, at the very minimum, Carol Bartz has framed the conversation around how Yahoo's doing and being measured differently.
Earlier, it was Google's % share of searches vs Yahoo's: a rather stark and quantitative loss every quarter and every year. Now, I'm not quite sure what it is but at the very least it is not that.
Earlier, it was Google's % share of searches vs Yahoo's: a rather stark and quantitative loss every quarter and every year. Now, I'm not quite sure what it is but at the very least it is not that.
I look at this statement as the moment when Steve Jobs brought Bill Gates on screen and announced that Microsoft was not the enemy anymore. It freed the company from the market share game where they were perpetually losers and allowed them to just create great products for their users.
Changing the story changed their destiny.
I knew of a profitable print publication that had a readership of about 90,000 people in the 1980's. But management saw other publications in similarly sized niches that had 100,000. They fought tooth and nail to get those extra 10,000 readers and spent incredible amounts of money to get them. But it actually pushed them into the red.
There's something very powerful about focusing on your real market and doing what you're good at.
Yahoo now has a clear goal of becoming and acting like the number 1 content company on the web. I think this clarity will bring positive results.
Changing the story changed their destiny.
I knew of a profitable print publication that had a readership of about 90,000 people in the 1980's. But management saw other publications in similarly sized niches that had 100,000. They fought tooth and nail to get those extra 10,000 readers and spent incredible amounts of money to get them. But it actually pushed them into the red.
There's something very powerful about focusing on your real market and doing what you're good at.
Yahoo now has a clear goal of becoming and acting like the number 1 content company on the web. I think this clarity will bring positive results.
Apple's arrangement allowed them to eventually come back around and start competing with Microsoft. (If you don't think so, look at the popularity of Webkit on phones and within Google.) I don't think Yahoo!'s arrangement will help them do that. I've got to ask, who's Yahoo!'s enemy? SmugMug? I agree with 37signals and Jeff Atwood that it's a good idea to have one. If you're going to expand, who's market share are you going to take?
http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch02_Have_an_Enemy.php
The nice thing about the Apple-Microsoft deal is that everyone still knew that Microsoft was Apple's enemy.
http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch02_Have_an_Enemy.php
The nice thing about the Apple-Microsoft deal is that everyone still knew that Microsoft was Apple's enemy.
We have always been at war with Eurasia.
I think it would be wrong to say that Yahoo has always been a search company. It's also a mistake to say they've never competed and tried to build their own search product. But they really never have been a "search company" in the way that Google is.
They are probably the number two internet property in terms of page views. If google has 70% of the search market and Yahoo has less than 20%, Yahoo couldn't possibly be competitive in terms of page views if they really were primarily in the search business.
They are probably the number two internet property in terms of page views. If google has 70% of the search market and Yahoo has less than 20%, Yahoo couldn't possibly be competitive in terms of page views if they really were primarily in the search business.
Actually, the problem is that they thought they WERE a search company, in the way that Google is.
My point is, instead, the ongoing bizarre otherworldly logic of their management.
My point is, instead, the ongoing bizarre otherworldly logic of their management.
To me, search specifically is something you don't want to give an impression you aren't good at. There are more types of "search" than just keyword search. There's ambient findability, which Flickr does and Bing is trying to do as well. Showing related items could gain from knowing about search. Is the Bing team going to dig deep into Flickr or is Flickr going to need to continue to be good at search? (And in the case of Flickr, there's plenty of room for improvement.)
I'm trying to think of a good analogy. Anyone want to chime in?
I'm trying to think of a good analogy. Anyone want to chime in?
Man I remember back when Yahoo Search was powered by Google.
[deleted]
This article reads like a parody:
+“I am a very viable number,” she said.
+The guard, um, encouraged Brad Stone and me to treat Ms. Bartz with respect. “She’s my girl.” (???)
We have always been at war with Oceania?
Did Yahoo not begin as a search portal?
No. it began as a subject catalog - Art, building, cooking, dining... In fact when it first launched it was literally just one page of links, then it became a page of links to pages of links, and so forth. http://www.dmoz.org/ (open directory) is the closest thing to what Yahoo used to be like and probably helped to inspire Wikipedia too.
back then search was possible but excruciatingly slow - you could use other net services like WAIS or Archie but it was the sort of thing you'd leave running the background. Plus those services were terminal based so navigation was tedious if you were on dial-up. Having all that stuff classified and aggregated on one website was a godsend. The amazing part is that in its early incarnation it was so simple anyone could have done it. Literally, just links and descriptors. I've often wondered if attitudes of and towards Jerry Yang have something to do with the extreme simplicity of how Yahoo started out, and the 'right place right time' versus any definable innovation.
I never, ever thought of Yahoo as a search engine - if I did a search there, I assumed I was searching their internal catalog rather than the whole internet. Lycos and Altavista were the search engines of choice, while Yahoo was the homepage where I went for aggregated content. Then one day I tried Google and never went back.
back then search was possible but excruciatingly slow - you could use other net services like WAIS or Archie but it was the sort of thing you'd leave running the background. Plus those services were terminal based so navigation was tedious if you were on dial-up. Having all that stuff classified and aggregated on one website was a godsend. The amazing part is that in its early incarnation it was so simple anyone could have done it. Literally, just links and descriptors. I've often wondered if attitudes of and towards Jerry Yang have something to do with the extreme simplicity of how Yahoo started out, and the 'right place right time' versus any definable innovation.
I never, ever thought of Yahoo as a search engine - if I did a search there, I assumed I was searching their internal catalog rather than the whole internet. Lycos and Altavista were the search engines of choice, while Yahoo was the homepage where I went for aggregated content. Then one day I tried Google and never went back.
No, it started as a hand-built directory of websites, and outsourced its search function, using several different providers over the years. It bought Inktomi at one point -- which at the time was one of the top search engines (it powered Hotbot) -- and that's when it became more of a search company.
Really? ...
They own many of the top content properties on the internet and they are very profitable (not as profitable as they could be, but pretty darn profitable). Sure they could have bought Google, Facebook, or any of the other companies that ended up being the top of search or social networking, but they didn't. So it makes sense to play in the games where they're successful.
It's like saying Michael Phelps isn't also a great athlete because he can't beat Usain Bolt in the 100 meter. Or vice versa. Google's content properties universally have failed to make a dent against Yahoo's strengths. So Google can't be the Yahoo of content and Yahoo can't be the Google of search. We should be okay with that.
At some point the market needs to stop judging them on what they might have been, and see what they actually are and might become.