Marissa Mayer: Towards Products

Yahoo Has Seen Its Future; In One Word, It's Products

the board was unconvinced that Mr. Levinsohn's deal-making and media savvy would be enough to save Yahoo. The economics of content aren't good enough, and Yahoo doesn't have the firepower to pony up, say, the $100 million YouTube is spending on original channels or the hundreds of millions more Netflix is spending to acquire rights to TV and movies..... By all accounts, Ms. Mayer wowed the board in interviews. While Mr. Levinsohn made a case for maximizing what Yahoo is today, Ms. Mayer represented what Yahoo could become, a company that builds products... Yahoo spent 18% of revenue on product development in the first quarter..... "Yahoo's entire value is built around starting points -- the home page and email" ..... "The only reason [Yahoo] can afford all the good content is the scale of the homepage and email." .... Yahoo will have to create new, powerful products in areas such as mobile

When David Filo Gets Excited, I Get Excited

Yahoo! Co-Founder David Filo said, “Marissa is a well-known, visionary leader in user experience and product design and one of Silicon Valley’s most exciting strategists in technology development. I look forward to working with her to enhance Yahoo’s product offerings for our over 700 million unique monthly visitors.” .... for the longest time after Yahoo! IPO’ed and David was a billionaire he continued to drive a beat-up Datsun to work every day ..... He still works every day at the company in a slightly messy cubicle. ..... One former engineer told me a story of how David jumped in and stayed up all night helping pitch in to solve some platform problem the company had several years ago and how he was always available to help with problems on IM. ...... “Why isn’t David on the board?” I asked a Yahoo! executive a few years ago........ “He doesn’t want to. They’ve asked him many times. He goes to most board meetings anyway. Besides, he’s happy to let Jerry be the public face for the two of them.”

Marissa Mayer enters the Yahoo pressure cooker

Goal: A Billion People On Twitter

Jerry Yang, David Filo. That is a count of two. No wonder they got beat by Google. But if the count were not two but a billion, or even 200 million like Facebook which is what Twitter will have to hit on its way to the magic billion? Then what? Then are we talking some serious competition? I think so.



Twitter does not pay anybody to tweet. Twitter is the ultimate crowdsourcing application. I think humans are going to take over the world. Unless machines fundamentally innovate.

If I were to take a really long view, I think this thing is going to be cyclical. Humans 2, Machines 1.

Search Come Full Circle: That Human Element
The Search Results, The Links, The Inbox, The Stream
Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter
I Talked To Google Through Twitter And It Worked Like Magic
Twitter And The Time Dimension
What Should Facebook Do
TweetDeck, Power Twitter, Twitter Globe, Better Than Facebook
TCC: Twitter Community College
Twitter Tips: It's A Bird, It's A Bird
Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter
I Get Twitter

Search: Much Is Lacking
The Next Search Engine
Email, Search, News

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Search Come Full Circle: That Human Element

Image via CrunchBase

Jerry Yang and David Filo camped in some trailer park on Stanford property and started creating a directory of all the interesting websites they came across. Jerry is human, so is David. This was when there were only a few hundred, then a few thousand websites on the web.

Then the whole thing exploded. Enter Sergei Brin and Larry Page. Larry once scared an Advisor by saying he wanted to download the internet, not one webpage, or website, or some data across the internet, but the whole damn thing. Sergei and Larry said humans can't, let machines do the search thing. And they won big.



But Twitter has all the buzz now. And Twitter is not exactly a search engine. But then it does something that Google does not do, and that is real time search. Their little search engine - the little engine that could - is still a machine, but it only bothers to search these little itty bitty tweets that get created by humans. The internet is more huge, and more explosive than ever before. And I am curious as ever. But I have only 24 hours in a day. So I guess I will let my circle of contacts act as a filter. JP Rangaswami out there in London has used the firehose metaphor to describe the internet. You are thirsty, but the internet is a firehose. How do you drink? Well, you use Twitter.

Twitter is not out to replace Google. But what if the power users end up spending more time on Twitter than on Google? Then Google has a problem on its hand.

The Search Results, The Links, The Inbox, The Stream
Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter
I Talked To Google Through Twitter And It Worked Like Magic
Twitter And The Time Dimension
What Should Facebook Do
TweetDeck, Power Twitter, Twitter Globe, Better Than Facebook
TCC: Twitter Community College
Twitter Tips: It's A Bird, It's A Bird
Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter
I Get Twitter

Search: Much Is Lacking
The Next Search Engine
Email, Search, News

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