Ask PG: What's your take on the Yahoo! situation?

[stevenboudreau]

Given the recent events, and that you sold Viaweb to Yahoo!, I'm curious to find out what you think of the whole Yahoo! situation. Carl Icahn has recently engaged in a proxy fight. Or is at least flirting with one. Should it have accepted Microsoft's offer?

[pg]

I think if Jerry and Filo had a chance to run the company for a while, they could probably surprise people. They're probably as smart as Larry and Sergey, but they've never had a chance to run Yahoo the way they'd like. If they had, it would have more of a hacker culture, and Google wouldn't be trampling them so badly.

[stevenboudreau]

Do you stay in touch with them, and/or with Yahoo in general?

[pg]

Not really. And that was 10 years ago. Most of the people I know at Yahoo now started after I left.

[sutro]

Ask PG: What should I have for lunch?

PG seems to have become a gnomic magic 8 ball of sorts. I can only hope for his sake that he's built Eliza-like behavior into HN such that his responses to all "Ask PG" questions are fully automated.

[pg]

A glass of prune juice or a nice marshmallow salad.

[pg]

BTW, http://members.wizzards.net/~mlworden/atyp/auden.htm

[kirubakaran]

When we were going to say hi to you on the pre-Startup School dinner, we were joking that we should corner you and ask ALL the questions we have, existential or otherwise ("why am I here", "what is the meaning of life", "what is the best color" etc) :-)

[pg]

we invited you; it's a mistaken metaphor; ff6600

[as]

That's always been my favorite color. I feel so validated.

[mattmaroon]

I so want my own site where people worship me. Now all I have is a site where I worship me.

It is the next best thing though.

[jkush]

That's why you should create an alter ego who thinks Matt Maroon is so great he makes a fan site.

[mattmaroon]

It would be hilarious if all Ask PGs just got the reply "make something people want."

[kirubakaran]

Come on, he wouldn't just hard-code his mini-me!

[kf]

Breaking news! Paul Graham ate breakfast.

http://reddit.com/info/4jxe/comments

[stevenboudreau]

I wonder who submitted the first "Ask YC" and "Ask PG" posts?

[chengmi]

rms: http://ask.searchyc.com/20070225

[keating]

Ask.

[as]

Why do you hope for his sake he's built Eliza-like behavior into HN such that his responses to all "Ask PG" questions are fully automated?

[rplevy]

When did you first know that you hope for his sake he's built Eliza-like behavior into HN such that his responses to all "Ask PG" questions are fully automated?

[stcredzero]

That's strange, because PG looks less gnomic now than in years past. (To be fair, some may have thought he once looked wizardish, not gnomic.)

[jpeterson]

I vote for tuna sandwich.

[startingup]

The long term consequence of "exit strategy" at work here. Yahoo "exited" way too soon, and the founders never really had any chance to shape the company. CEO Koogle assembled Yahoo (one of the smaller parts being ViaWeb) and Semel tried to remake it in a Hollywood direction.

Contrast this to Amazon, and later Google, where the founder(s) have had very strong influence on the culture. Another company where the founder exited too soon (voluntarily) is Ebay, and Ebay has no soul whatsoever, and they are doing everything they can to lose their natural monopoly.

[byrneseyeview]

Slightly offtopic: this thread showed up as dead earlier today. Was it resurrected?

[pg]

Yeah, an editor must have killed it. But it seemed harmless enough so I unkilled it.

[SwellJoe]

You must be new here. Links on the site fall off the stack eventually--but when you reload the page, new ones are made. It's a "feature" of the architecture pg used to build the site (continuations based).

So, if you sit idle on any of the comment pages for more than a few minutes it becomes unavailable. You have to start over on the main page and dig your way back down. I imagine this is not a fundamental flaw of a continuations-based design, since Seaside seems to cope with it OK (I guess?)...merely something that pg, or someone else, has not added the code to handle yet.

[byrneseyeview]

No, no. I mean the title of the article ended with "[dead]".

[SwellJoe]

I must be new here. I've never seen that happen.

[byrneseyeview]

Go to your profile, and change 'showdead' to 'yes'.

[SwellJoe]

It sounds confusing. I think I'll leave it alone.

[aneesh]

Speaking of being new, it's ironic that both your accounts are the same age.

[SwellJoe]

Ironic, or suspicious?

[jpeterson]

Only two things would've caused them to spurn Microsoft—excessive self-worth or hubris—both of which are bad.

[e1ven]

I'm not sure that I agree here.

Despite the public statements to the contrary, I suspect that Yang's motivations are not about the short-term financial plan, but about the long-term survival of the company and of their culture.

Microsoft is a massive organization, and has had several problems integrating smaller players into it's corporate structure. My suspicion is that a number of higher-level Yahoo members are convinced that if the Microsoft were to go through, they'd lose the ability to continue to decide their own fates. Look at the AOL-TW merger for an example of the clashes that can arise when trying to combine two massive companies with dissimilar cultures.

Yahoo employees may additionally be concerned, given that their potential suitor has quite a history of purchasing, or nearly purchasing companies, and not fully utilizing them.

In immediate dollar terms, no, turning the deal down doesn't make sense.. But in a long-term view of "where do we want Yahoo to be in 5 years", it makes all the sense in the world.

The problem for the Board is that the stockholders are more interested in the former, than the later, so Yahoo is trying to contort to justify using a framing they don't agree with.

[andrewf]

Once the shareholders have sold the company off to Microsoft, if Yahoo falls apart, that's Microsoft's problem. It wouldn't hurt the people who had already sold Yahoo, so it's not a scenario that Yahoo's board should be considering.

(One caveat: the Microsoft offer is part cash, part stock. Since part of what Yahoo shareholders will receive is stock in the combined entity, I suppose that predicting a meltdown a year down the road means you're saying the offer is worth less than the current calculated value)

[ideas101]

i totally agree with you - also if you're trying to get my baby (for whatever reason and price) then I would certainly make sure that my baby grows healthy, but the history says that chances of growing healthy with microsoft is very rare. Yang would also make sure that people (shareholders, employee and end-users) who love my baby so much today, keeps loving in the future as well - but it looked like only one person was loving the deal and other two (employees and end-users) were certainly not that happy with the deal so....