Re:Yahoo is shutting down about half of its content verticals
by bitL on Wednesday February 17, 2016 @10:33PM
(#11123517)
Then it's pretty silly to shutdown verticals as they most likely share the same source code as the rest. When you consider most SW companies try to establish as many revenue streams with as little people possible, cutting verticals is the last thing you want to do. Instead they should figure out how to share as much code as possible. But hey, it's Yahoo!
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Re:Yahoo is shutting down about half of its content verticals
by dgemm on Wednesday February 17, 2016 @10:39PM
(#11123547)
It's the content that takes effort to maintain, not the code.
Re:Yahoo is shutting down about half of its content verticals
by toast0 on Thursday February 18, 2016 @02:25AM
(#11124237)
When I left Yahoo travel in 2011, and there wasn't much shared source between verticals. We shared the same software stack (mostly), where that includes os, web server, PHP, MySQL, yui, a search engine, sometimes a PHP framework, but all of the pages were pretty specific to the vertical. Generic pages wouldn't work very well -- details for a hotel aren't really that similar to details for a car; and genericizing it means more process to make changes and a less compelling site.
When I left they were working on a unified data processing system for this group of verticals, which didn't really work. Two years later, they just got rid of most of the content, in favor of big pictures and articles. I'm guessing that's why there's no traffic and they're shutting them down.
Re:Yahoo is shutting down about half of its content verticals
by bitL on Thursday February 18, 2016 @10:35AM
(#11126463)
OK, that explains it! Seems like "fiefdomization" of verticals is widespread :-(
Re:Yahoo is shutting down about half of its content verticals
by toast0 on Thursday February 18, 2016 @12:45PM
(#11127635)
You can call it a fiefdom, or you can call it decentralized decision making. It is definitely a large part of why the CEO of Yahoo, whoever it is today, is largely unable to make a huge difference. If I were CEO [1], I would actually embrace this, and return individual responsibility to the verticals. I'd also switch back the logo :)
Anyway, in most of these verticals, Yahoo was competing with companies that were dedicated to the space, and had way more people working on it. Yahoo! Travel was in the neighborhood of 25 people, and TripAdvisor was closer to 1,000. We were able to compete because we could leverage yahoo platforms, and then do what we needed to do within our space.