Recently heard a talk by Thomas Friedman about how the year 2007 was a really interesting "inflection" year wrt all kinds of technology.
The cost of making solar panels began to decline sharply in 2007. Airbnb was conceived in 2007 and change.org started in 2007. GitHub, now the world’s largest open-source software sharing library, was opened in 2007. And in 2007 Intel for the first time introduced non-Silicon materials into its microchip transistors, thus extending the duration of Moore’s Law — the expectation that the power of microchips would double roughly every two years. As a result, the exponential growth in computing power continues to this day.
Yahoo was an awesome company in 2007. Back when developer conferences were more or less free (for attendees), it hosted the first conference I attended as a newly transplanted person to SF... the "Open Source CMS Summit"... I think I still have some of the stickers it handed out to promote some of its then-recent acquisitions the original article discusses. Yahoo! was kind of one of the first companies to really actively engage and enable external developers (those not employed by Yahoo) as collaborative partners who probably could have helped Yahoo keep its then competitive advantage. Mozilla did this a bit earlier, yes... but not as a publicly-traded company. So part of its demise was due to impatient investors, for sure; however, I think the article makes a good argument for the implications of ignorance when it comes to fostering community.
It's now ten years after this inflection point that Friedman talks about; and according to him, it's just getting started.
I know nothing about the company, but in ~2003 I remember associating yahoo with elderly people who didn't know how to use their computer. Granted, this could have been a side effect of doing tech support for a dial up ISP.
I agree that 2007 was a big year - that's also when the iPhone first came out. But I don't think "we're just getting started" - I think the opposite, that we've been coasting on the momentum that the innovations of 2007 provided, and we're gradually running out of new ways to use them.
Was it ? In my own reality in 2000 yahoo was already irrelevant and had never managed to be awesome in any way. It was just another web portal that no one really cared about, sort of a less obnoxious AOL.
The cost of making solar panels began to decline sharply in 2007. Airbnb was conceived in 2007 and change.org started in 2007. GitHub, now the world’s largest open-source software sharing library, was opened in 2007. And in 2007 Intel for the first time introduced non-Silicon materials into its microchip transistors, thus extending the duration of Moore’s Law — the expectation that the power of microchips would double roughly every two years. As a result, the exponential growth in computing power continues to this day.
His talk was basically a rehash of everything he talks about here: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/dancing-in...
Yahoo was an awesome company in 2007. Back when developer conferences were more or less free (for attendees), it hosted the first conference I attended as a newly transplanted person to SF... the "Open Source CMS Summit"... I think I still have some of the stickers it handed out to promote some of its then-recent acquisitions the original article discusses. Yahoo! was kind of one of the first companies to really actively engage and enable external developers (those not employed by Yahoo) as collaborative partners who probably could have helped Yahoo keep its then competitive advantage. Mozilla did this a bit earlier, yes... but not as a publicly-traded company. So part of its demise was due to impatient investors, for sure; however, I think the article makes a good argument for the implications of ignorance when it comes to fostering community.
It's now ten years after this inflection point that Friedman talks about; and according to him, it's just getting started.