| 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. |