Tech Your Universe

Published by nick on 14 Feb 2008 at 04:44 pm

Yahoos won’t work for Microsoft

32 Comments technology, yahoo

32 Responses to “Yahoos won’t work for Microsoft”

1. Sue Massey on 14 Feb 2008 at 5:00 pm #

   I found your site on google blog search and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. Just added your RSS feed to my feed reader. Look forward to reading more from you.

   - Sue.

2. a friend on 14 Feb 2008 at 5:27 pm #

   nice suckup bud

3. Richard Chapman on 14 Feb 2008 at 9:34 pm #

   I didn’t know Yahoo! was so entrenched in Open Source. That’s wonderful. It’s easy to see that no matter what, if Microsoft kidnaps Yahoo! it will cease being Yahoo! in every sense. I guess it would become Boohoo.

4. lmw on 15 Feb 2008 at 2:33 am #

   intersting point of view. have a look at the following survey to see how much companies trust Microsoft technology and running the server products of microsoft.

   http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2007/11/23/november_2007_web_server_survey.html

5. Boycott Novell » Links 15/02/2008: SGI Buys Linux Networx, New GNOME, Cloudbook Out on 15 Feb 2008 at 5:01 am #

   […] Yahoos won’t work for Microsoft […]

6. Chief Slappumho on 15 Feb 2008 at 9:15 am #

   Interesting read my friend.

   Just for the record, Yahoo is a little bit evil. Their home page vs google’s homepage makes me want to gouge my eyes out. Should keep it simple and ad free.

7. nick on 15 Feb 2008 at 10:30 am #

   Regarding yahoo’s homepage vs googles home page and the number of ads, I hear this a lot, but I don’t think it’s the right comparison to make.

   www.yahoo.com is a PORTAL, not a search.

   Check out search.yahoo.com, that’s a better comparison to www.google.com

8. Tuffy on 15 Feb 2008 at 10:43 am #

   "having it [Microsoft] on my resume would be detrimental to my career."

   While I understood your overall unwillingness to work for Microsoft before, this line is what really hit home. I see now that having Microsoft on your resume changes it from the kind of resume that employers you want to work for will be interested in to the kind of resume that is only going to get you call backs from business environments that will be unfriendly to your way of working.

9. Tim Hodkinson on 15 Feb 2008 at 11:20 am #

   Just like Tuffy, the Microsoft/resume point really caught my eye too.

   Is it possible that hiring a developer who has previously worked for MS is a potential legal problem should MS ever sue your company (or your customers) for patent infringement?

   Also, will the future contributions of Yahoo developers to FOSS projects be viewed with some uneasyness (copyright, patent issues) if they become MS employees? Will MS acquire an interest in past Yahoo contributions?

10. Derek on 15 Feb 2008 at 4:28 pm #

    As a "yahoo alum", I’m going to have to disagree with you on *some* points (on most you’re spot-on).

    "Because Yahoo! has continually demonstrated that they hold integrity above profits."

    Horse. Shit.

    Yahoo for years had a nice streamlined plain-jane front page, barely adorned with graphics. Until the day it launched a Ford Explorer pop-up ad full of flashing graphics and roaring noise. The answer given (by, shall we say, a very very senior person who by definition represents the core values of the company) to the many Yahoos asking "Why?! WHY?!" .. "Do you know how much we got paid for that?"

    When many of us predicted the compromises to Yahoo’s integrity that would have to be made in order to do business in China, the answer given repeatedly (again, by that same person): "But think of how many eyeballs that represents!!!" … Ask Shi Tao if he thinks Yahoo put integrity above profits?

    I’m not saying they shouldn’t make a profit. Believe me as a shareholder I want them to be profitable. But don’t kid yourself and put them up on this pedestal that "oh, they would gladly sacrifice money to save their integrity," because that’s simply not true. They’re a for-profit entity like every other. Their particular "evilness" may manifest itself differently than that of, say, Microsoft, or that of say, SCO, but they’re not the saints you make them out to be.

11. nick on 15 Feb 2008 at 5:16 pm #

    @Derek:

    I stand by what I said - Yahoo has the trust of the internet, more than most publicly traded companies, because it does not compromise it’s integrity for profits.

    But let’s look closer at your points, because perhaps I have painted them as a bit too angelic.

    1) Ads - Is your position that because Yahoo takes on advertising, they are selling their integrity for money? Huh? By this definition, every single website that has ads is evil. If that’s your position; ok — where is it that you work? Yahoo is a business, and they provide valuable services to users. In exchange, users look at ads. This is how television, newspapers, and other media has worked for years. Are they evil too? Are you saying that Yahoo! should remove all it’s ads? I agree that advertising shows that Yahoo! is interested in money, but it is indeed possible to be interested in money and have high integrity. Unless you are one of those money-is-the-root-of-all-evil guys.

    2) China - Yeah, I figured this would come up if I tried to paint Yahoo as too angelic. And maybe you’re right. The line I’ve always heard is that Yahoo! chose the integrity of abiding by the laws of China instead of supporting one individual. As a company, if a government comes knocking at your door asking for data, what do you do? Stand your ground and break the laws of the country? I guess it brings up some interesting questions about what you do if you don’t agree with the laws of the country, because breaking the law also compromises one’s integrity.

    I see your points. It’s not fair for me to say that Yahoo! is totally unmotivated by money. Wait - did I say that? — Otherwise they wouldn’t be a publicly traded company, there would be no ads, and no revenue, and… they wouldn’t exist.

    So Yahoo! isn’t perfect. But they are sure as hell a lot better than Microsoft in the integrity department.

12. Derek on 15 Feb 2008 at 6:05 pm #

    @nick:

    re: ads

    My point isn’t "they should have turned down ads", they already had ads on the front page at that point. They were not "garish", they were not pop-ups (or worse, pop-unders), they were simple banner ads.

    This was a time in Yahoo’s history when Filo could tell you, to the dollar, a cost of putting a single byte on the front page (byte x page-views x cost-per-byte of bandwidth) and everyone was very careful about not "overloading" the front page, making it a pleasing place where people would want to come. It was, at the time, a core value. Simple. Functional. Nothing getting in your way of doing what you came to the site to do.

    Right up until a flash-animated Ford Explorer came burrowing out of the middle of the page interrupting your intended web search.
    The point was that one of the core-values at the time was a simple easy-to-use front page that DIDN’T do all the annoying things that ad buyers wanted. It was what drove people to the site.

    And Yahoo abandoned that core value when a check with enough zeros was waved in front of its face.

    Re: China

    "Integrity" would have meant not being there at all. There were a lot of Yahoos who were firmly against having services in China in the first place. Because we knew that "following the local laws" could very well mean sending people who only wanted to end human-rights oppression into horrendous prisons.

    Integrity, when it comes to China, would have meant standing up and saying "that’s a place where the cost of doing business in it is simply too high for us. We would have to do things that are abhorrent to our nature if we want to legally do business there," and then walking away. Let someone less reputable, someone who values money over morals, fill that gap."

    I disagree that "breaking the law compromises one’s integrity". Quite the contrary, some of the greatest people of the highest integrity demonstrated their integrity by breaking the law ( Rosa Parks, Gandhi, the forefathers of the American Revolution ). Integrity means abiding by your principles above all else.

    I struggled hard with this, when the China deal happened, actually. The first round of layoffs in 2001 came shortly afterwards, and I almost volunteered for them, because I felt strongly that we had lost our core values.

    Is Yahoo better than Microsoft? Probably. It certainly depends on who you ask. Microsoft certainly has its own monopolistic evil tendencies, but then again, they haven’t specifically helped send an innocent person to political prison, either. (Well, not that’s made significant press, anyway, as I can’t find one via Google *grin*)

    I agree with you completely on your main point, though, that a large number of Yahoos will leave if the purchase happens, and maybe that’s completely intentional on Microsoft’s part. The fact of the matter is, though, I think most of the folks who leave Yahoo like that will find a welcome embrace up the peninsula at the ‘Plex.

13. Fellow Yahoo on 15 Feb 2008 at 10:30 pm #

    I’m so happy that you don’t represent the majority of people at Yahoo.

    Most of us are not zealots who blindly think everything from Microsoft is evil. I encourage you to talk to someone who has worked there or works there now and see if you think they’re evil. They’re not. They are people who are just trying to do the right thing and care for each other and their company. If you knew anything about Microsoft, you would know that they do use a lot of open source software internally. You do know that you can write OSS for Windows, right?

    Do you really think that Microsoft is going to spend $44 Billion on a company and then tell us to throw everything out and rebuild it? That would be incredibly stupid. Unlike say, Oracle, Microsoft is all about winning and doing whatever it takes to get there. It’s not an ego thing.

    A few facts you got wrong:

    Jeremy Zawadny [sic] hasn’t worked on MySQL for a long time.
    Douglas Crockford didn’t invent JSON. He simply discovered a syntax that was already built in the language and popularized it for data exchange. JSON isn’t even open source. It’s a standard and even IE supports it.
    Yahoo does not have their own "version" of apache. It’s stock apache with a few patches and extensions.
    Memcached isn’t nearly as popular inside Yahoo as other technologies. That’s not a criticism of memcached, just a fact.
    Um, MySpace is built using all Microsoft technologies. I would call that a large scale website.
    Oh, and you don’t know how to use "it’s" versus "its’".

    For the future, your arguments would be more convincing if you used real facts instead of made-up ones.

14. DarkPhoenix on 15 Feb 2008 at 11:16 pm #

    Re: lmw

    Quoting Netcraft to show that people "like to use MS tech on the Internet" is somewhat disingenuous; it is well-known to people who are willing to look past the fancy graphs that IIS’ numbers are boosted because a lot of domain squatters (like GoDaddy) use IIS as their main web server. As a result, IIS looks like it has larger marketshare than it actually does.

15. Pras Sarkar on 15 Feb 2008 at 11:20 pm #

    I’d like to add that Yahoo! also contributes and heavily supports two large open source projects "Hadoop" and "Pig".

    But you’re spot on about the rest!

16. nick on 16 Feb 2008 at 9:46 am #

    @Derek: Thank you for your insights. I wasn’t at Yahoo! during the times you mentioned, and I appreciate you sharing. Agreed on China and I see your points on ads. -10 goodness points for Yahoo!

    @Fellow Yahoo: I found one thing you said helpful. Thanks for the grammar tip! As for the rest, let’s take a look:

    1) Not all Yahoos agree with me. Agreed. There are those that either a) don’t know about Microsoft’s history, b) don’t care because it does not effect them (they don’t work with Open Source technologies), c) don’t care because they are technology agnostic.

    Most Yahoos are also not as vocal about this issue as I am, because they are playing it safe. But ask around in the development circles, and you’ll find that a high percentage of Yahoos are unhappy about the Microsoft talks, and 1 out of 10 will leave if the deal goes through (which is what I said in my original article).

    2) I do work with 3 different people that have worked at Microsoft, and I agree the people aren’t evil. I maintain that Microsoft has a demonstrated history of integrity-compromised business practices, and I would be embarrassed to admit to working there.

    3) As for your nitpicking of the wording on just how much Yahoo! uses open source technologies… I’m not even going to take the time to quibble with you. The main point is that Yahoo embraces and supports open source technologies, Microsoft does not.

17. Derek on 16 Feb 2008 at 10:06 am #

    @Fellow Yahoo

    "Yahoo does not have their own “version” of apache. It’s stock apache with a few patches and extensions."

    yapache, if it’s still in use, was WAY MORE than just "a few patches and extensions" to Apache. At the time I was there, yapache was a complete internal code-fork of (I think) the 1.2 codebase. My recollection is hazy but I think there was a code-fork of 1.2 because there was some feature that Yahoo wanted/needed which 1.2 didn’t support, so they implemented it in yapache-1.2, but then 1.3 DID supply it. But by then, the yapache codebase had diverged so greatly that merging back was simply not an option. There was, then, a big push towards rewriting all the various yapache modifications as Apache 2.x compatible modules so that the stock server codebase could go back to being "as downloaded". When I left in late 2001, that conversion was still in place.

    But the "thing" known as yapache was definitely an internal code-fork not shared with the outside world, and thus could easily be called "their own version of apache".

18. Investors’ new insight on mergers — employee bloggers | IR Web Report on 18 Feb 2008 at 12:54 am #

    […] This was borne out last week when a Yahoo! employee posted an item on his blog headlined Yahoos won’t work for Microsoft. […]

19. Chris on 18 Feb 2008 at 10:43 am #

    Very strong points on #1 and #3. #2 I find less compelling, but I guess everything is relative. If Yahoo isn’t evil, why don’t they allow free forwarding and POP/IMAP access for their webmail users? Why was there such a stir among Flickr users when that service was acquired and subsequently integrated? Why is there still a litany of "Marketing Preferences" that must be unchecked when signing up for a Yahoo ID? The previous commenter’s points about advertising overload detracting from UI and about China policies also ring spot-on.

    Yes, everything is relative, but then perhaps we should frame a discussion around these points not vis-a-vis Microsoft, but Google. They don’t do a bad job of making money, and if you asked most well informed techies about points 1, 2, and 3 I venture to bet that a vast majority would say that Google wins out, hands-down.

20. nick on 18 Feb 2008 at 11:22 am #

    4 days after this post, the New York times did an excellent article on this concept:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/18/technology/18integrate.html

21. Another Fellow Yahoo on 19 Feb 2008 at 9:08 am #

    Pay no attention to Fellow Yahoo, at least as far as the "MS ain’t so bad" angle. MS is bad. Maybe not evil anymore, but their technology is simply poor. One reason Myspace (the ugliest site on the Internet) uses MS is due to all the music and other such media they need to serve. MS sure has that locked up because MS LOVES licensing!

    Here’s the deal: no, not all engineers loathe Microsoft. Yahoo has plenty of folks that can’t do ANYTHING without a GUI, trust me. These folks blindly run Windows because that’s what they know. I can’t tell you how many developers I’ve seen that don’t even understand basic unix concepts like chmod. My argument is that Yahoo shouldn’t even have these developers in the first place, and these are the folks ambivalent about Windows. I guess what I’m saying is: mediocre engineers care about someone letting them have a job more than Windows versus unix.

    While I do agree that MS wouldn’t be dumb enough to start ripping out PHP, jboss, RedHat, and FreeBSD, I think you are delusional if you don’t think MS will start trying to "influence" future architecture. Apps don’t stay around forever and when the next brand-new app or ground-up redesign happens, you can bet there will be "suggestions" for Windows Server and .NET. Puke.

22. Yet Another Fellow Yahoo on 20 Feb 2008 at 7:04 pm #

    I’ve worked at both Microsoft and Yahoo, and can tell you that this whole "evil" thing is "Horse. Shit." as Derek put it. Both companies are large, profit-driven corporations and have many unethical employees who make "evil" decisions (at all levels). These employees are of course a minority at both companies. Most of your coworkers and leadership at both companies are decent, hardworking, ethical people driven to succeed and win.

    There was a time when Yahoo was more like Microsoft and Google, and was mostly engineering-driven. Today, Yahoo is mostly comprised of non-technical staff, especially editors (who make up ~20% of the employee base), program managers and sales. Of the few engineers Yahoo does have, most are PHP script-kiddies. The only real centers of engineering excellence at Yahoo are the search, Panama/Apex, and YUI groups. Everything else is junk. That’s why Yahoo relies so heavily on open source — they lack the engineering manpower to build custom systems like Google and Microsoft have done.

    When Yahoo is acquired by Microsoft, they will be dazzled by how much more sophisticated Microsoft’s internal engineering is. Yahoo Paranoids can’t hold a candle to Microsoft’s stringent software security reviews. If Microsoft jettisons any Yahoo technologies, it will be to improve Yahoo’s incredibly poor data center utilization and performance (some Yahoo technologies max out at ~10 requests/second — thank goodness for caching and horizontal scaling (= throwing more hardware at it)).

    And yet Microsoft is only a shadow of its former excellence — today Google has the best engineers, including most of the best from Yahoo and Microsoft. That’s why Google’s winning and will continue to win. Online advertising and services are technology-driven, and Google has the best technology-makers. These days, even Amazon (a book store!) is kicking Yahoo’s butt. Oh yeah, and Amazon.com is served up using their own custom software, just like Microsoft and Google. If anything, Yahoo is proof that open source isn’t as great as it’s chocked up to be.

23. PingPing on 20 Feb 2008 at 7:37 pm #

    Dude, in the worst case, you can always drive 4 miles north on 101 and work for Google!!!

24. Tim Hentenaar's Blog on 26 Feb 2008 at 4:54 pm #

    […] hit home. Nick, a Yahoo employee, made some very interesting points on his blog post entitled "Yahoos won’t work for Microsoft". In said post, he postulates that many Yahoo employees would have left had the deal gone through. […]

25. Another Yahoo on 03 Mar 2008 at 9:02 am #

    @Fellow Yahoo:

    "I encourage you to talk to someone who has worked there or works there now and see if you think they’re evil."

    Over the last decade, I’ve worked with MS plenty and asked the pointed questions more than once. The general response was "yes, they are an evil empire. When you start working here you don’t stop thinking they’re evil - you simply start accepting it."

    —-

    As a Yahoo! engineer, I won’t just lay down my arms and walk away if Microsoft buys us out. Maybe if I were fresh out of school, had no fiscal responsibilities other than to myself, and if I were full of these grand and glowing ideas that there existed a Utopian company… But I know better, and I know that whether you’re going Yahoo! to Google, Google to Yahoo!, or Yahoo! to Microsoft, you’re simply trading one set of headaches for another. I left off a transition starting with Microsoft because everyone knows when Microsoft is on your resume, nobody else wants to hire you anymore.

26. Prashant on 15 Mar 2008 at 8:23 pm #

    For a year after college, I programmed at an Investment Bank, using only Open Source
    Technology, and I didn’t find the transition to Microsoft bad at all. I thought it was good
    to get an opportunity to something new — .NET,C# etc. Take it as an opportunity to learn
    something new. But then I guess each of us has different views.

    On the whole, I do you really think Yahoo might be forced to use completely different
    technology ? Maybe not. ( Not that I have much idea about this ) Things might not be as bad as you feel.

27. Lukemp on 24 Mar 2008 at 12:29 am #

    Brilliant text., brother

28. » Reason People are Leaving Yahoo (compiled from our candidates) Ask BINC: The BINC Blog: Ask BINC on 24 Mar 2008 at 1:25 pm #

    […] with Microsoft/Yahoo potential merger and don’t want any part of it. - There was a posting on Techyouruniverise.com, written by a current yahoo employee. He goes into detail about why yahoos won’t go to work for […]

29. BINC on 24 Mar 2008 at 1:52 pm #

    Great post! We work in the recruiting industry and constantly hear reasons why or why not candidates are leaving yahoo! One of them was they don’t want to be part of the Yahoo!/Microsoft Merger.

30. dave on 27 Mar 2008 at 10:39 am #

    "Their server software does not scale, is not stable, and is full of security holes"
    Yea, like SQL Server 2005 that does not have a single disclosed security vulnerabily to date after being on the market for 3 years.
    http://blogs.technet.com/security/archive/2008/03/05/sql-server-fact-checking-recent-vulnerability-history.aspx

31. nick on 28 Mar 2008 at 12:24 pm #

    @dave, you wrote:
    "Yea, like SQL Server 2005 that does not have a single disclosed security vulnerabily to date after being on the market for 3 years."

    Good point, I bet MSFT does have a few secure products if we look hard enough. Following your logic, since Notepad [probably] doesn’t have any security holes either, that means that all versions of Windows are secure, right?

    End sarcasm.

    My original comment stands. Microsoft products are full of security holes. Microsoft has a poor history when it comes to security, and no one in their right mind would deny that, not even Bill Gates himself. Search around and you’ll find his internal memo on Trustworthy Computing.

    Microsoft has made progress on this front. They suck less than they did 10 years ago. However, Microsoft is not well trusted in the industry, and a big reason for that is their poor security.

32. VB6 works fine on XP but not Vista - Error 445 | keyongtech on 18 Jan 2009 at 10:02 am #

    […] Re: VB6 works fine on XP but not Vista - Error 445 On Thu, 14 Feb 2008 17:37:54 -0800, "Karl E. Peterson" <karl> wrote: in <eSVejN3bIHA.4144> >Robert Morley wrote: >>I think some of the Office apps have an Application.FileSearch. Maybe it’s >> not VB6 but VBA? > >You’re probably right. Yeah, looks like it’s part of the Office Object Model… > >http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/lib…ffice.10).aspx > >I think the OP needs to provide a little more context/code to have any hope of >troubleshooting, here. None of the examples on that page show the sort of usage he >suggests. > >Hmmmm, a little googling makes me think perhaps we’re not getting all the >information! > >http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/archive…/t-250502.html > >Turns out FileSearch was *dropped* from Office 2007. So much for "COM is a >contract!", huh? Thought you’d be amused with this: http://www.techyouruniverse.com/tech…-for-microsoft […]

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