I feel like this unique blend will be Yahoo's lasting contribution to the field of management theory.
Here in Brazil Elop effect was interesting: it was VERY obvious, yet noone here knows who the hell Elop is.
To put it simple: When Elop released that stupid memo, Nokia had 67% of Brazil smartphone market share, and the share was still rising, and Nokia utterly dominated in the non-smartphone market too. Right after Elop memo, the first thing that happened is that suddenly the communities died (although Nokia store DID suck, there was at least in Brazil a vibrant freeware app community that shared stuff in forums), then just some months later you could not find phones for sale, even new models, because the import companies DID heard of Elop memo, and decided to not risk importing the phones, even if shopkeepers still wanted it.
The end result was funny: Elop nuking of Symbian was so hard, that in Brazil other smartphones could not keep up for a while, and we temporarily had a decrease in smartphone use, and a increase in feature phone use, and that increase came mostly from truly crap chinese companies, because not even Nokia feature phones could be found in stores anymore.
By the time Elop was announced as CEO in late 2010, Kallasvuo had already guaranteed Nokia was toast.
Just go back to the way Nokia was behaving, and what they were saying in 2007/2008 for easy proof of that.
"Nokia CEO calls Apple iPhone ‘niche product’"
http://macdailynews.com/2008/04/17/nokia_shares_slammed_in_w...
http://www.informationweek.com/mobile/nokia-ceo-disses-iphon...?
http://www.forbes.com/2007/02/12/nokia-kallasvuo-iphone-face...
> In the same year, he joined Macromedia's Web/IT department[7] [...] from January 2005[10] for three months before their acquisition by Adobe Systems
> He was then president of worldwide field operations at Adobe, tendering his resignation in June 2006 and leaving in December,[12] after which he was the COO of Juniper Networks for exactly one year from January 2007 – 2008
This is not the CV of a man that I would hire for anything other than running a going concern into the ground.
Pipes's interface is primary the work of Jonathan Trevor, with lots of help from Daniel Raffel, Ed Ho and others.
I would love to read a blog post about how exactly it was mismanaged. It would be great for others to learn lessons from the mistakes.
[1] I don't have first-hand experience but one of my best friends work there and we regularly vent to each other about work complaints.
> With any kind of support, or even benign neglect, the product would have been successful.
Look at IFTTT services now and it's easy to realize that pipes even in its original incarnation could have been so much more given its brain dead UI ease.
It's a shame that Yahoo is shutting this down rather than pivoting it as an IFTTT or similar. I'd wager that it's lack of ownership that makes it hard to pivot. I also don't recall it having a premium tier which has got to weigh down the resources--talent always gravitates toward revenue centers it seems.
Ie the 'new management can't fire my entire division for being unprofitable' center. Seems like a smart move for the people who wrote Pipes but never found a business model for it.
I'm sad to see it go and it'll be missed by quite a few people who use my plugin.
Jonathan Trevor's Javascript was out of this world amazing for the time.
The backend was an extremely useful tool for munging RSS feeds. With any kind of support, or even benign neglect, the product would have been successful. It took a lot of active mismanagement and folly to keep Pipes from living up to its promise.
Hats off to psadri and the other Pipes creators for a really stellar piece of work.