undefined | Better HN

0 pointslaurent925y ago0 comments

I don’t understand what Yahoo is supposed to be. Suddenly in 2015, they have the genius step of publishing an email UI on paar with Gmail, as they should have done about 10 years earlier. But unless you are using their email, what _is_ Yahoo? For me it is a weather widget and a news feed. Not counting Yahoo Finance because other comments say it’s shutting down. So what is the core business of Yahoo? A news corp that repeats Reuters, but without the TV front-end that CNN has, and without the journalists that the Washington Post has?

0 comments

7 comments · 6 top-level

TedDoesntTalk5y ago· 1 in thread

I can't answer that for today. But there was a time when they had a very active shopping site -- they were an earlier version of Amazon for 3rd-party merchants, Shopify or Etsy where anyone could open a "store". And Yahoo handled payments, as I recall, just like Amazon does now. I bought many things from there.

Where is that today? Gone, I guess. But it could have been an Amazon or Shopify.

They also had a lucrative ad business. Gone now, I think.

Stratoscope5y ago

And bringing this full circle, I wonder if you may be referring to Viaweb?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viaweb

SllX5y ago

> I don’t understand what Yahoo is supposed to be.

The corporate equivalent of a terminal cancer patient.

What it was, is aptly described here: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2848

astrange5y ago

They were originally a do-everything Internet company like Google, but without the aura of smugness and infinite amount of ad money. (My friend who was a Yahoo Search sysadmin tells me they had nearly as good results as Google on much, much smaller amounts of hardware expenditure.)

At some point they tried to become a media company or something and did hire a lot of journalists, but they kept making the wrong moves and trying to acquire users by buying unprofitable websites like Tumblr and eventually ran out of money.

caddemon5y ago

I don't know what they're trying to be, but outside of Yahoo Finance the only other thing I'm aware of people using Yahoo for these days is fantasy sports. One of the fantasy football leagues I do every year still uses Yahoo, and other friends that play fantasy seem to report similar. But I don't know what the numbers actually are because it's true Yahoo doesn't seem to lean into that role much.

TedDoesntTalk5y ago

How about a new venture? Like building an alternative to the Apple App Store and Google Play? Then going to Congress to complain about default installation on the devices (or any sort of installation at all).

They have the name recognition to pull off something like this.

rdiddly5y ago

They seem to be trying to be nothing at all, and getting closer with each passing year!

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments