Skip to main content

Home/ opensociety/ Group items tagged programmers

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Johann Höchtl

What Happened to Yahoo - 0 views

www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html

Yahoo Google Microsoft Facebook culture hackers innovation cubicle old

shared by Johann Höchtl on 12 Aug 10 - Cached
  • When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing.
  • What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the company.
  • Yahoo had two problems Google didn't: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • The first time I met Jerry Yang, we thought we were meeting for different reasons.
  • we could show him our new technology, Revenue Loop. It was a way of sorting shopping search results.
  • It was like the algorithm Google uses now to sort ads, but this was in the spring of 1998, before Google was founded.
  • I didn't say "But search traffic is worth more than other traffic!"
  • Hard as it is to believe now, the big money then was in banner ads.
  • Led by a large and terrifyingly formidable man called Anil Singh, Yahoo's sales guys would fly out to Procter & Gamble and come back with million dollar orders for banner ad impressions.
  • By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto pyramid scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth.
  • The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic was that advertisers were already overpaying for it.
  • I remember telling David Filo in late 1998 or early 1999 that Yahoo should buy Google, because I and most of the other programmers in the company were using it instead of Yahoo for search.
  • But Yahoo also had another problem that made it hard to change directions. They'd been thrown off balance from the start by their ambivalence about being a technology company
  • Microsoft (back in the day), Google, and Facebook have all been obsessed with hiring the best programmers. Yahoo wasn't. They preferred good programmers to bad ones, but they didn't have the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people that the big winners have had.
  • The company felt prematurely old.
  • The first time I visited Google, they had about 500 people,
  • I remember talking to some programmers in the cafeteria about the problem of gaming search results (now known as SEO), and they asked "what should we do?" Programmers at Yahoo wouldn't have asked that.
  • In the software business, you can't afford not to have a hacker-centric culture.
  • Probably the most impressive commitment I've heard to having a hacker-centric culture came from Mark Zuckerberg, when he spoke at Startup School in 2007. He said that in the early days Facebook made a point of hiring programmers even for jobs that would not ordinarily consist of programming, like HR and marketing.
  • Hacker culture often seems kind of irresponsible. That's why people proposing to destroy it use phrases like "adult supervision." That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example.
  • Johann Höchtl on 12 Aug 10
     
    Paul Graham hat mit dem Verkauf seiner Shop Lösung an Yahoo 1998 Millionen von Dollar gemacht. Er ist Buchautor und respektierter Columnist. Ein Artikel von ihm, warum seiner Meinung nach Yahoo scheiterte und FB und Google erfolgreicht waren.
Parycek

Was Apple alles zensiert - n-tv.de - 0 views

www.n-tv.de/...es-zensiert-article904627.html

apple app

shared by Parycek on 05 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Parycek on 05 Jun 10
     
    Welche Programme auf iPhone oder iPad laufen dürfen, bestimmt Apple. Wer sich nicht an die Regeln hält, fliegt aus dem App Store. Politische Satire und Sex sind tabu. Gewalt ist pfui und nutzlos sollte ein Programm gefälligst auch nicht sein. Das erinnert einen doch an irgendwas ...
Johann Höchtl

Granada Ministerial Declaration on the European Digital Agenda - 0 views

www.eu-spocs.eu/...declaracion_granada%5B1%5D.pdf

ict europe granade declaration ministerial 2010

shared by Johann Höchtl on 28 Apr 10 - No Cached
  • Johann Höchtl on 28 Apr 10
     
    Cloud computing und konkrete Maßnahmen zur Malmö-Deklaration werden gefordert. Eine Frechheit ist aber (auf der Zunge zergehen lassen!) "Safeguard the openness of the internet through implementing and monitoring of the new EU electronic communications rules on network provision." Fazit: Abgeschmackter Einheitsbrei ohne innovatives Potential; die bestehenden FP7 ICT PSP Programme werden in folgsamer Weise thematisch am Leben erhalten
Judith Schossboeck

UK approach to online petititions - 1 views

petitions.number10.gov.uk

epetitition epart petititions

shared by Judith Schossboeck on 17 Mar 11 - Cached
  • Judith Schossboeck on 17 Mar 11
     
    In line with the commitments in the Programme for Government published in May 2010, e-petitions that receive 100,000 signatures or more will be eligible for debate in Parliament - interesting!
thinkahol *

Slavoj Zizek: 'Now the field is open' - Talk to Al Jazeera - Al Jazeera English - 0 views

english.aljazeera.net/...2011102813360731764.html

Slavoj Zizek: 'Now the field is open' - Talk to Al Jazeera English

shared by thinkahol * on 01 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 01 Nov 11
     
    The philosopher discusses the momentous changes taking place in the global financial and political system.
1 - 7 of 7
Showing 20▼ items per page