Yes, as a "Yahoo Evangelist", you are probably close to 100% biased.
> We didn't win the big prize, but we also aren't AOL, Lycos or Ask.com either. Just because we didn't become Google doesn't mean Yahoo! has failed.
Here's the Signature yahoo denial of reality syndrome. It's quiet similar to the surreal discussions you can casually have with YSearch people telling you that Google Search is an inferior product (or ymail beats gmail, or 360 will own facebook, ..). Basically trying to convince themselves rather than anyone else.
Listen, this is just like alcoholism, if you can't admit that you have a problem, you will not go anywhere. Yahoo has been steadily losing on most fronts for more than 5 years now and it is currently in the mist of a huge identity crisis. Multiple metrics can attest an AOLization process is going on! You're right by the way, Yahoo has not failed yet, neither did AOL, they're still around, just totally irrelevant ..
> As an engineer though PG's second point strikes me as deeply unfair. I joined Yahoo! in 2004 in the UK. The team I joined was exceptional. For a team of 30 people there were about 15 book authored by the team. I personally had written W3C standards and multi Web Standards Project founders littered the team. The rest of the team were coders, much better than I.
Beyond the lines aimed solely to your own glory. Does writing a book means being talented to you?
No more seriously, I'll pass on the rest of your post, but basically, I'm under the impression that you might be looking at things through the prism of your rather different role in that company. That sounds pretty cool to fly the world and talk about the new hot piece of frontend code written by yahoo's javascript mafia, but please realize that somewhere in Santa Clara, random Joe engineer might see Paul's analysis as an opportunity for Yahoo to wake up, acknowledge the problem and rethink itself.
PS: please, no "ad-homonym" attack!
What about Node.js? That's pretty en vogue right now. We are currently hiring Node.js engineers and have a number of core contributors in various parts of the company.
YUI and our other front-end work at Yahoo! is world class. People like Crockford are considered leading experts in doing quality front-end web engineering.
Our data centers are also cutting edge, I'm not an expert in this area, but I'm told we are at least on par with Google. Some of the new project are completely cooler-free, the whole building being designed to control heat and power flow.
http://trafficserver.apache.org/
http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/
http://github.com/yahoo
http://yuilibrary.com
http://developer.yahoo.com/yap/guide/caja-support.html
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/
http://developer.yahoo.com/hadoop/As an example, I was at Yahoo for 5 years (2003-2008) working in the Search Marketing division. Tons of data, tons of optimization possibilities. Could we use the Hadoop cluster? No, for some foolish internal accounting reasons.
I have trouble defining "hacker culture", but surely it's about more than just the engineers working at a company.
If Yahoo's engineers work on these great projects, but no one hears about them - then it's probably because the culture at Yahoo isn't "hacker-ish" enough to motivate marketing to drive awareness for the projects.
Disclaimer #2: This is my own completely unsanctioned opinion and does not necessarily represent Yahoo!'s views or opinions.
I'm obviously biased here, but I have a great respect for HN and PG so I wanted to talk about this.
PG accuses Yahoo! of two things right at the very top of the article and the rest of the article is more details on those things. They are a) access to easy money removed Yahoo!'s desire to find the next big thing b) ambivalence about being a technology company.
I'm not going to substantially repute a) because I think it is true. However, I think it's a pretty big ask to expect someone being successful to see past the current success to the next big win. PG admit's neither he nor Larry and Sergey really understood how big search was. As such I feel it's a slightly ad-homonym attack to blame Yahoo! for not being Google. We didn't win the big prize, but we also aren't AOL, Lycos or Ask.com either. Just because we didn't become Google doesn't mean Yahoo! has failed.
As an engineer though PG's second point strikes me as deeply unfair. I joined Yahoo! in 2004 in the UK. The team I joined was exceptional. For a team of 30 people there were about 15 book authored by the team. I personally had written W3C standards and multi Web Standards Project founders littered the team. The rest of the team were coders, much better than I.
Now I work in US for the developer network and I get to see the vast range of technologies that Yahoo! does from Y! Research through to the engineering teams. There is a reason 'Hack Days' started here, because the engineers here are passionate about those technologies and playing with them.
I'm also on the Yahoo! Open Source Working Group and I see all the open source we put out of the door. We should probably do a better job of telling people how much, but it's a lot more than you think. I find it troubling that PG who left the company 10 years ago, can now, accuse me and my colleagues of apathy about technology when it's so fundamental to what Yahoo! does.
I think what PG is really talking to is two things. Firstly, it's important for a company to have a 'core competency'. Describing ourselves as a media company makes it clear to our investors and our employees the field of play. Secondly, the ease at which a cash-cow, such as Google's search war chest, allows them to make their presence felt in the technology community reminds people about all the things they touch. I am both proud an envious that Google have the freedom to do that, but again, it doesn't mean Yahoo! failed because we don't.