I guess this proves that banning work-from-home didn't solve their problems.
Yahoo was the internet destination back in the 90s and into the 2000s until Google started to eat their lunch in search and email.
In my opinion, Yahoo's strength was its diversity; it was a one-stop shop for everything internet. You could register domain names, set up web pages, sell items, conduct email, instant messaging, etc. all within the yahoo.com domain. Gradually, it seems that other, nimbler competitors have gradually chipped away at Yahoo's lead until it seems they don't do anything particularly well compared to the competition. Too bad.
They still do have 400 million email users, and email users are loathe to change, so that business is probably safe for a while. But with nothing new to offer, and many good offerings sinking or gone, Yahoo is becoming a low price acquisition target. Sad to watch; at one time it was the iconic Internet business, in the Fortune 500, that could seemingly do nothing wrong.
> I guess this proves that banning work-from-home didn't solve their problems.
I don't know what's the big deal about that. It affected ~200 people max. Yahoo was just tightening the restrictions, bringing them in line with the rest of the Valley companies. And yet people still think that it was a big deal; it wasn't.
Maybe it wasn't a big deal for you but it was perceived negatively overall and it hurt Yahoo's reputation (or whatever remnants of that remained at that point in time). If only 200 people were affected then it wasn't worth the backlash it created and wasn't a smart move. Anyone who was impacted by it, e.g. wasn't able to go pick up his kids or stay home for a plumber to come fix his sink, wouldn't be happy and his unhappiness would impact people working with him. These sort of moves can hurt the "spirit" of a company irrevocably.
In actuality it just tightened the existing restrictions on remote workers to the very upper echelon of ICs. It didn't really impact occasional work-from-home people much as long as they flew under the radar, but it did impact the sort of people who lived in the middle of Idaho. Everyone was required to relocate to within 100 miles of a Yahoo office and commute in most days, unless they were truly irreplaceable and their VP went to bat. Oh and imagine relocating to be near an office that was subsequently closed.
It was a stupid policy decision, it damaged the Yahoo's public reputation due to their incompetent PR (nothing new there) and it has cost Yahoo a considerable number of excellent (but not truly irreplaceable) employees.
In conjunction with the drive to re-centralize teams back in Sunnyvale (after other drives to de-centralize to less competitive markets to hire better people), this cost Yahoo a lot of their network engineering team, among other groups. LinkedIn, Apple, and other companies have reaped the benefits of Yahoo's short-sightedness.
Whenever a company has to resort to cleaning house to rid itself of dead weight -- either by "banning" remote workers, mass layoffs, or whatever else -- the real story is that they simply don't know who is doing good work and who is not. If they knew, that, then the non-workers would already have been separated from the company.
Either the managers are not suited for their roles or not empowered to perform the duties of their roles or terrified of political nonsense like losing headcount and reqs and being demoted. Yahoo has consistently failed to properly measure employee performance, either taking a lackadaisical approach to performance or using pseudo-scientific nonsense like bell curves. As a result, there has always been a lot of dead weight -- inside the offices is no exception. They're currently being sued for their firing practices, and the suit suggests that the performance measuring system is wielded punitively for political purposes. I don't find this at all hard to believe.
There is no easy fix to a poor work culture, and I don't think Yahoo really has ever had the stomach for the hard fixes. The culture is too poisonous and it has persisted too long. It doesn't matter now though, Yahoo won't be around in its current form for too much longer.
>Yahoo's strength was its diversity; it was a one-stop shop for everything internet.
I consider that its greatest weakness.
It didn't do any of these things particularly well. So focused competitors (Google, GoDaddy, eBay/Amazon, Skype/AIM, etc.) eventually took over and dominated. Yahoo never really retaliated by making their services any better. In fact, I can't even think about any major overhauls to any of Yahoo's various products. They've come out with a few nifty things (none of which I can even remember by name) and that's all I can remember about them since 2003-2004. In 2012 I was surprised to hear they were still in business, to be quite honest.
> They still do have 400 million email users, and email users are loathe to change, so that business is probably safe for a while.
I'm one of them, and Yahoo makes precisely zero dollars from me -- they've been a free IMAP server for almost 20 years. It will be a huge PITA when they die and I have to tell a bunch of people to update their address books. I wish there were a way for me to pay them a few bucks to host my mail, because other options like running my own mail server and "sharing" everything I say with Google are not so good.
Doesn't seem worth it to me, but it isn't that expensive in the grand scheme of things. If it makes you feel better about paying them, at least circa 2012, only users on paid mail farms had their mail data backed up. Everyone else's mail was not ever backed up (although each farm has a dedicated Netapp Filer which provides operational redundancy).
Agreed. I wish e-mail (and many other services) wasn't a "free" offering from diversified players. I think pure play businesses who gasp charge enough to make a living and a profit based solely on their product's direct value are very appealing.
The maddening thing is that they used to offer Mail Plus for $20/yr, and it was eliminated in favor of providing those features to all users (good idea). So this new paid plan is much more expensive and offers much less value.
It also seems kind of hard to believe that Yahoo makes $50/yr off of ads per user. They certainly are not pulling that in across the hundreds of millions of mail accounts they claim to have. Since Yahoo is getting the money up front and without the work and risk of selling ads, I would actually expect it to be priced at a discount versus what Yahoo would see from ad revenue.
Yahoo was the internet destination back in the 90s and into the 2000s until Google started to eat their lunch in search and email.
In my opinion, Yahoo's strength was its diversity; it was a one-stop shop for everything internet. You could register domain names, set up web pages, sell items, conduct email, instant messaging, etc. all within the yahoo.com domain. Gradually, it seems that other, nimbler competitors have gradually chipped away at Yahoo's lead until it seems they don't do anything particularly well compared to the competition. Too bad.
They still do have 400 million email users, and email users are loathe to change, so that business is probably safe for a while. But with nothing new to offer, and many good offerings sinking or gone, Yahoo is becoming a low price acquisition target. Sad to watch; at one time it was the iconic Internet business, in the Fortune 500, that could seemingly do nothing wrong.