Could also be a subject of “Tumblr to shut down on 12/17”
And yea, the last pillar of Marissa Mayer’s hubris falls.
1.1 BILLION dollars she paid for Tumblr.
Yeah no kidding, who uses Tumblr except for 18+ blogs?
A long while ago I put a site block in chrome for anything .tumblr.com and .pinterest.com
So any time news pops up about either of them I’m suddenly amazed that the rest of Earth hasn’t also marked them on ignore.
To be fair, the old Minimal Mac website was on Tumblr, and one security site I read is on Tumblr.
So, there are at least two.
My favorite blog ever is on Tumblr.
Also:
Tumblr is vital for Animalssittingoncapybaras.
I was at Yahoo during the Tumblr acquisition. They had to redo our whole editorial CMS so that it was based on Tumblr. Pretty annoying process. I also had to start managing a Yahoo Games Tumblr page, which, unlike our Facebook page, nobody ever looked at.
Strange days, those. Felt like we were chasing something new every month. Good gig though. I miss that salary & benefits.
OMG OMG OMG OMG did you get to meet Marissa?
Geez man. This belongs in the woes of IT for sure. “Eating your own dog food,” taken to the extreme.
Dogfooding was hot shit at Yahoo. There was a ton of grumbling (from yours truly among others) when they forced us to use Yahoo Mail for our work email accounts, too…
Yes, very briefly, after an all-hands in Sunnyvale. My whole department, what was left of it, was potentially on the chopping block and I didn’t want to look like I was begging for my job, so rather than saying “please don’t cut Games” (which to be fair she didn’t for another few years), I said something like “I don’t want to talk about work.” I don’t think she liked that very much. I was going to congratulate her on her pregnancy but didn’t work up the nerve. She had very intense, piercing eyes.
We were all pretty happy when Marissa first came on board, you know. There had been an insane revolving door of CEOs and interim CEOs up to that point – five all told, I think, in a span of a single year from Carol Bartz to Marissa. (The nadir was Scott Thompson, who was CEO just long enough to lay off the entire Games team [and others] before getting fired for having lied on his resume; fortunately a last-minute switcheroo kept a skeleton team for Games, including myself, but a lot of my coworkers got the axe permanently on that day.) Marissa brought back a bunch of perks (free lunches, that sort of thing) and gave us a shot of confidence. She gave us permission to believe, or at least hope, that we could still be a big tech player. In the end it didn’t pan out, obviously.
I don’t know what moves could have been made to save Yahoo at that point, but whatever they were, she didn’t make them. She also screwed up Games with some weird aquihires in the .05% of her attention span that she put into it, but that’s a tiny piece of Yahoo and irrelevant in the larger picture.
Whatever the right path for Yahoo was, spending all its money on fifty-odd acquihires (No, really. Fifty. Look it up) probably wasn’t it.
Personally, I would have dumped all the expensive halo stuff, dumped all the content sites including gaming (sorry) and invested in webmail and Flickr.
Hoping for a Google>YouTube or Facebook>Instagram type of situation. Didn’t pan out.
The real mistake was closing GeoCities!
Why yes, I do think that was a huge mistake, throwing away all those users and their content. That was before Marissa’s time, though. While she turned out to be deadly, her predecessors were true clownshoes, almost HP levels of incompetence.
I know; I lived through it and almost lost my job 3 1/2 years earlier because of it.
The GeoCities comment was more of a joke.
It’s tough when a company gets outpaced by rivals in its core competencies. It’s left with a well-known brand and struggles to find something to do with it. The “are we a tech company? are we a media company?” question was asked over and over again for ages. We kept trying to claw our way back in search, and hoped for an acquisition hail mary, but the truth was by 2010 or so Yahoo’s biggest raison d’etre was that a ton of eyeballs (mostly older ones) still went to Yahoo.com every day. It was like the sheer inertia of brand recognition without any distinct product behind it. Or, rather, with a hundred different products all frankensteined together. Meanwhile the Ali Baba stake was keeping money rolling in while having nothing to do with what Yahoo itself was producing.
Flickr had a dominant position, best in brand, and they just let it sit fallow.
Facebook bought Instagram the same year Mayer joined Yahoo. Now that was a smart acquisition. Google Photos didn’t launch until 2015. Flickr could have dunked on them both.
Yeah, Flickr was a tragedy. Great fucking product, basically left to die on the vine.
It wasn’t just a great product, although it was. There are tons of great products that never take off. It had deeply invested users who loved it. Tragedy is the right word.
Haven’t seen anything like it since Google killed their successful social network with tons of loyal users, Google Reader, and then subsequently proceeded to try and fail to build social networks several times. Golly, sharing and commenting on news items, seems like that’s a lot of what goes on with Facebook, doesn’t it? Dumbasses.