Anyone fooling themselves and thinking "It'll be different this time," is in for disappointment. Of course Tumblr is the next Geocities. Yahoo is a public company that won't tolerate the freedom that Tumblr offers.
I think I'm outside the ages Tumblr is marketed toward, but when you say "freedom" are you referring to lack of censorship, e.g. pornography and other obscenities?
Mayer is cobbling together a new set of Yahoo properties via acquisition, but that won't change the perception of Yahoo with younger demographics.
Yahoo's problem is that they have no gorilla products. They have no big, dominant product/s, that generates billions in revenue, and is still growing at double digits. There's no core to what Yahoo is, so they're on a perpetual treadmill of buying other sites / services to replace dying sites (eg Tumblr for Geocities). So long as you're buying other sites to supply your core, you'll always be running behind (not to mention it requires incredible vision to buy the right sites / companies).
The history of the Web says that the dominant players all have gorilla core products that provide moats.
Go to Yahoo.com and tell me what you see... it's still a boring portal from 1999. They're not the leader in search. They're not the leader in social. They're not the leader in mobile. They're not the leader in cloud services (eg AWS / Azure / App Engine etc). They're not the leader in image hosting / sharing or streaming video or music. They're not the leader in email. They're not the leader in web gaming / social gaming.
So Mayer is going to buy Tumblr, which will chase off their most loyal users. Then Yahoo is going to have to figure out how to pay for the billion dollar acquisition, which will chase off even more users. And in the end, the best value they can ever derive from Tumblr will be portal style integration with yahoo properties, which is something they could have gotten in a simple deal.
A lot of people are looking at Flickr as a reference point to this deal. Yahoo paid $35 million for Flickr, and it had a functional business model that is still alive today.
Yahoo doesn't necessarily have to bolt onto Tumblr onto a dying core, one option would be to milk yahoo.com (and leverage whatever synergies exist) to invest in Tumblr as a new and seperate replacement core.
Maybe not likely, and maybe not enough "there there" to build an appropriate sized business around.
We share the same reasoning. What Yahoo lacks is a core. It was never given the chance to develop one, because all management teams have focused on buying products. And it's a pity, because Yahoo has the resources to battle Gooe in search and advertising. I don't fear Google, Bing, ddg or blekko in search. I fear Yahoo and Amazon. Both have. Real chance to take down Google, but are too busy making money(amazon) or wasting it (yahoo).
I think it boils down how Yahoo manages to integrate it into its portfolio. I really hope they succeed somehow. Internet could use some more competition.
I really hope they succeed somehow. Internet could use some more competition.
When they announced Marissa as taking over, I just wasn't sure anyone could steer that company in the right direction. Perhaps maybe it was just better left for dead.
However, I've been impressed by the moves she's making & believe she's going to turn it around. I'm rooting for her to succeed.
It takes guts to build your own company. It's just as ballsy (if not more so) to climb aboard a sinking ship, get out your pail and start moving buckets of water, one by one.
I'm really hoping Yahoo the best. Although they have no products, that I'm aware of at least, that I'm using, I have used Tumblr briefly. Like some others here, when I heard Mayer was appointed as CEO from Google.
I thought that was awesome for the company, and even though some of the devs didn't like the HR changes, it does show her commitment to change that is badly needed.
What I will give Yahoo the biggest credit they deserve is that THEY ARE making headlines and becoming a common topic of discussion. I just really hope that Yahoo does cultivate Tumblr (even though I think the acquisition is over priced to make headlines) and carve a strong niche as a bloggers goto solution, and that the users don't start a mass exodus.
>>What I will give Yahoo the biggest credit they deserve is that THEY ARE making headlines and becoming a common topic of discussion.
Making headlines does not have to cost over a billion dollars. Hiring PR agencies is much cheaper.
My opinion however is along the same lines: at least Yahoo! Is looking like they have some sort of plan and are working (i.e. spending) towards them. This is probably better than the alternative, which is doing nothing.
A lot of people still use a yahoo email. I suppose when they first got their email, it was supposedly better than hotmail (gmail hasn't even come out yet), and they haven't bothered to change since because, really, it's good enough. Yahoo messenger too, I guess. And probably a lot of people have yahoo as their homepage (for some reason...wonder why!) and never bothered to switch it to something else more sensible. That might explain how yahoo.com is still top 5 on Alexa[1].
You actually bring up a great point about the Yahoo's homepage.
I think I remember a while ago that Yahoo's homepage was automatically set when I bought a new laptop....you know the bundleware crap that laptop makers have set when you buy a pc laptop.
I actually really agree with you, I just didn't want to say it so strongly lol!
Am I the only one that believes that in Tech, it's out with the old and in with the new? Or do you believe if it "ain't," broke, don't fix it?
Yahoo as a company could be trying to rebrand it's self though (at least I really hope so)....but then again didn't Research In Motion just rebrand their company as Blackberry (finally)...maybe hope is lost already for Yahoo?????
The OP has a lot of knowledge about the dot-com bust, and is a smart dude. It's unsurprising he sees it through this lens, though I don't quite see it the same way. Marissa Mayer has a better sense for product (from my POV) than Jerry Yang / whoever was running Yahoo in 1999.
That said, it's still interesting to hear how the dot-com survivors view the current crop of net companies.
Yahoo is like HP. They once had pretty great engineering and relevance, but they are a zombie company now. If I were a Yahoo shareholder, I'd be pretty pissed about this deal.
I disagree. There's something else people could do: Wait for real data.
Of course this doesn't mesh with the "we have to write something or no one will have anything to click on and we won't get any ad revenue" angle, but my point is that "too new to do anything but speculate" implies something needs to be done.
