It's just sad to see Yahoo! in such a bad shape. I was just talking to a friend about the great Yahoo! in the times of Hack Day! and Brickhouse.
They bought some of the hottest startups back in the days (Flickr, Delicious, Upcoming...) only to neglect them, shut them or let them die. These were amongst the first companies that had put the user front and centre, leveraging the fabled user generated content. This was of huge value for any company and they let it slip through their fingers.
Also, at Brickhouse they developed Fire Eagle, one of the first services to work with location, and a great take on it too. A central and independent place where you could post your location to and then you'd grant access to other services choosing the level of detail (e.g. you phone was constantly posting your most accurate location and then Twitter could have access to your current City, Facebook to the Country you're in and Dark Sky could access Lat/Lon).
And, of course, they once owned Geocities.
Then they shut some stuff down, closed Brickhouse and I think they stopped hosting Hack Days. I know correlation does not imply causation but I find it very difficult to dissociate these two situations. How can a technology company thrive if they kill their innovation internal cycle?
Yahoo! seems to once have had one of the best innovation cultures in industry only to see it disappear like this. Everything that has been happening since then (like death by acquisitions) looks like part of the plan or the lack of thereof.
Yup. I rejoiced at that and backed Andy right away. It may not end up being what Upcoming was before but it felt right to back his initiative anyway even if just to condemn Yahoo!s take on it.
Upcoming is just another example: way ahead of its time. Take the number of companies in the events space nowadays. Take the millions of dollars invested or spent in such companies. Lots of meetups happening everyday around the world...
Yahoo! has just let it die instead. It's even hard to argue that Upcoming was off because it was ahead. I can't see why the events on Upcoming wouldn't turn into what meetups are today. All it needed was someone to take care of the product and the community. Gatherings and events have been happening since before Upcoming was created and are now being managed on Meetup, Eventbright, Lanyrd, etc... It isn't the case of these companies creating a new space for them, they just took it from where Upcoming (and others, probably) left.
They bought some of the hottest startups back in the days (Flickr, Delicious, Upcoming...) only to neglect them, shut them or let them die. These were amongst the first companies that had put the user front and centre, leveraging the fabled user generated content. This was of huge value for any company and they let it slip through their fingers.
Also, at Brickhouse they developed Fire Eagle, one of the first services to work with location, and a great take on it too. A central and independent place where you could post your location to and then you'd grant access to other services choosing the level of detail (e.g. you phone was constantly posting your most accurate location and then Twitter could have access to your current City, Facebook to the Country you're in and Dark Sky could access Lat/Lon).
And, of course, they once owned Geocities.
Then they shut some stuff down, closed Brickhouse and I think they stopped hosting Hack Days. I know correlation does not imply causation but I find it very difficult to dissociate these two situations. How can a technology company thrive if they kill their innovation internal cycle?
Yahoo! seems to once have had one of the best innovation cultures in industry only to see it disappear like this. Everything that has been happening since then (like death by acquisitions) looks like part of the plan or the lack of thereof.