A portion of the recent disdain / negativity seems to come from the recent cull of work from home employees and statements regarding the value of working from an office to Yahoo, there was quite a bit of anger directed at Mayer for that.
HN has had an anti=Yahoo bias for a long time; the reasoning behind the bias keep changing ("layoffs", "delicious", "WFH", etc.), but it always seems to be there.
I wouldn't rule out individuals with individual axes to grind, but most of the anti-yahoo sentiment is based on: their track records of no interesting products, acquiring and then squandering interesting products, and management decisions that run counter to HN's preferred "attract and retain top tier talent" approaches.
If Google continues its current growth trajectory and Yahoo! sticks around, I wonder how long it will be before people start rooting for Yahoo! as the "underdog".
Err, that happened quite a while ago. I think people were rooting for Yahoo just before their (failed) Panama Adsense competitor was released. (I say "failed" in the sense that while it kind of worked, it didn't match AdSense's results)
Your comment doesn't make it clear if you realize just how much bigger Google is than Yahoo. Google is worth $300B, Yahoo around $30B.
I think most, if not all, of those heaping scorn on Yahoo! would definitely like to see Yahoo! succeed and provide some viable competition to Google and Facebook.
Generalisations are dangerous, but I think the people on HN generally aren't Yahoo fans because traditionally they don't appear to value good engineering.
PG summarised it quite well:
But Yahoo also had another problem that made it hard to change directions. They'd been thrown off balance from the start by their ambivalence about being a technology company....The worst consequence of trying to be a media company was that they didn't take programming seriously enough....Yahoo treated programming as a commodity....One obvious result of this practice was that when Yahoo built things, they often weren't very good. But that wasn't the worst problem. The worst problem was that they hired bad programmers.
I think the majority of the anti-Yahoo bias is simply from the company still being alive, despite not having done anything right the last decade. A functioning market needs companies to fail quickly.
I use a yahoo.com email address (created mid 90s) to subscribe to mailing lists etc. But I check it thru Thunderbird or K-9 email clients. I just visited the Yahoo website after several years and it looks like it could have been designed in '99. You'd think with a billion dollars to spare they could hire a couple of good designers who know their CSS. I guess Google's website has also looked the same for a long time but Yahoo.com hasn't the elegance or the sheer usefulness of Google.
Wow, I actually was just about to go check it out so I could say you were wrong, but I can't really disagree. The upper and left elements have some of the clean/flat trend, but the rest of the page is ridiculously busy.
I could see both sides of the argument and not wishing to drag the thread on to a tangential discussion I do believe that it is better for the company in the long run, though perhaps not best for some of the companies individual employees.
