When I worked at Yahoo (2003-2005) the talk was the same: Engineering, which dominated the company, largely thought Yahoo was a tech company.
But Yahoo was an advertising and media company.
Yahoo never quite managed to resolve that conflict, which rose straight to the top, and it kept causing stupid things like the massive amount of money that was poured into their own search engine instead of focusing on the content and services that actually had users continue to come back and stay within the network (e.g. Mail never made much money, but a large portion of users went to the Yahoo homepages to log into their e-mail, and a good portion would end up clicking on various news articles etc.)
Lots and loss of engineering effort went into project that'd never have been greenlit if Yahoo had accepted earlier what it was.
But Yahoo had a great deal of Google-envy at the point I was there, and it coloured a lot of decisions. At the same time, Yahoo didn't have the cash to operate like Google. E.g. where Google engineers could order servers by the dozens without justifying it, I had to present my arguments to a harware review group in Sunnyvale (I ran a team in Europe) to get a single new server to run the European billing system that processed millions of dollars worths of payments. So on one hand they wanted to be more like Google, on the other hand they didn't want to pay or it, and meanwhile what made Yahoo money was first and foremost the content side.
great line.
> Many former X employees blame overexuberance on the part of Google’s marketing division for the hostile reception that greeted Google Glass
it was $3000, hard to get, and what were people really going to do with it?
Sure. Marketing.
> He notes that although Glass was marketed to the public as the Explorer Edition, many people assumed it was a finished product.
Fair point, but how many years are people supposed to eagerly wait?
> The effort, known internally as Tableau and championed by Brin, had been a plan to create gigantic TV screens.
what? lol.