[mgkimsal]

More to the point, I've no doubt that some Yahoo employees have likely investigated this sort of tech and built prototypes, only to get shot down by middle management.

I've no special insight at Yahoo (had a couple friends work there) but for any sufficiently large company with employees as talented as Yahoo (YUI, YQL, etc) this has surely happened. So... to have your idea/prototype/demo shot down, then later $30m spent on essentially what you'd offered the company for free... that's gotta be frustrating.

Again, pure speculation that this had happened, but I'd be surprised if no one internal to Yahoo had floated/demos something like this before. They certainly could have bought some of the hype (stephen fry, etc) during a rebrand. But... instead, they buy from outside vs using and promoting internally.

Once more - just speculation, but that's were I would suspect frustration would come from.

[easytiger]

> investigated this sort of tech and built prototypes, only to get shot down by middle management.

Bingo.

in fairness the culture there prob prevented people from even feeling this innovative and self motivated.

I've worked in a couple of large orgs where i've told management about great little cheap ideas that just get ummed and ahhed and then forgotten (despite in 2 instances using my own free time to make a prototype).

[mgkimsal]

No doubt, and that's part of the legacy of having "hey, we're a media company!" leadership from many moons ago.

There used to be an incredible mix of talent at yahoo, and they squandered a lot of that.

What's also interesting is that no one (yet? - maybe I missed it?) seemed to mention the Yahoo 'kiss of death' - how many acquisitions have they done that end up never seeing the light of day, or get shut down? Brickhouse seemed like it might be successful, but culturally that didn't seem to work out too well over time.

[vidarh]

Having been in the position of shooting down all to often, the challenge for managers here is that often we get 100 absolutely crap ideas for every gem, yet the developers who bring them to us often are totally blinkered about which ideas are a fit for the company and/or are remotely realistic.

That makes it very easy to make calls that in retrospect might seem extremely stupid. Even more so, many of the engineers who get shot down for truly bad ideas will still insist they are good.

Getting the balance right for what you spend time on is very hard.

(That said, I did work at Yahoo until 2005, and at least "my little corner" of Yahoo did feel very bureaucratic and not very conducive to innovation even then)

[easytiger]

Agreed. Which is why I don't pitch too many ideas anymore in my current role unless I've done some exploratory coding.

That has led to 2 different internal products and I'm presently working on something to replace a piece of commercial software that they paid almost $1 million for and doesn't work/has serious limitations. However I did it out of band because I found it interesting. I guess it comes down to put up or shut up.

Often when you come up with an idea, then go to try and do it you realise its 100x times harder than you thought