I'm perpetually mystified Yahoo isn't a bigger presence on my phone. The Yahoo! games division ignored the mobile market. The Yahoo portal app is a literally an embedded browser onto which yahoo overlays 4 buttons. Home, Post to Facebook, Share, and More.
Why does the most noticeable feature in a Yahoo app post links to a competitor's website? Is management paying attention? Do they have an actual mission?
Yahoo's mobile websites can be useless (e.g. sports.yahoo.com shows an alphabetical listing of teams in NCAA football conferences, but you cannot see their standings). Do the people handing the sports website actually watch sports? Does the project manager not realize I'll never use their sports site again?
Does yahoo not see phones as a priority? Why hasn't someone taken charge and attempted to bring Yahoo to the mobile market in a meaningful way? As an end user it seems the company is coasting. Is the new CEO going to be able to get something going or is the company too stuck in the mud to get some focus on development?
I know the post is not really the questions you were looking for but from the outside all I see is disorganization, lack of focus and fear of change. Why would someone want to go into that environment?
While I think Y! has some good products on mobile, I do understand your frustration. I (this is me personally, not as a Y! employee) am also looking forward to the company allocating more resources towards mobile.
While I don't have much to say about your product questions (I'm an engineer an open-source platform team at Yahoo, other end of the spectrum), one that I can answer though is...
> "Why would someone want to go into that environment?"
Good question. Like all companies, you should choose the one that most fits your ideals and career objectives, so I can only answer your question from my perspective. For me, that is working for a large Web company, who values open-source and front-end engineering, and provides unique challenges and problems to solve at a massive scale. All other issues or perks are secondary to me as long as I get to spend my workday doing what I'm passionate about, and my company supports my interests. There are few, if any other companies I can work with that match what Yahoo can in that regard. In fact, in 2008 there were only two companies on my list when I was looking to make the move from the startup-world, I interviewed at both, one was warm and welcoming (Y!), the other not as much. Really happy with the way things worked out.
It's tough (impossible?) to get everything you want in a work environment. Remember, happiness is entirely relative [1]. You can find dozens of blog posts about people being unhappy at Google, Facebook, Yahoo, startups, etc. just as you can find people who are extremely happy. Everyone values different things, but I think the interest most people share is that their company values them. Oddly enough, last year I referenced a Marissa Mayer quote in a short blog post [2] about finding happiness in your career, and why I like Yahoo. Glad to see she also realized Yahoo is an awesome place to be.
You just have to prioritize which aspects are important to you, and ensure those are important to your employer as well. If someone is choosing their employer based off reasons other than how they spend 95% of their workday, they should reevaluate their situation. That's at least my philosophy.
Sorry that probably doesn't answer your product questions, but I felt your underlying question was "Why Yahoo?", so I tried to best answer that.
Thank you for taking the time to write a response. I know my original post was a bit scattershot. You gave a very good reply for what I gave you to work with.
I actually joined on the same day as Marissa so I can't really comment on how the vibe was beforehand. That said, I do approve of the job that she's doing.
The difference (to me) is pretty dramatic, and the confidence of being able to get stuff done is night & day. It still boggles my mind to think about how much has changed in just 1 month since she started. Fun times at Yahoo, that's for sure.
Theres nothing on that article that says a team is on a deathmarch, unless you posted the URL wrong. Just because a project got re-allocated (I don't even know what project this is, btw) doesn't mean the engineers were fired or something. :-/
