What happened to Flickr? Marissa Mayer. She counted user experience as one of her core skills. She revamped Flickr's user experience. When she was done the site was unusable. I think she realized it, because along with releasing the new UX she compensated for its suckiness by upping free storage to 1TB. A couple of takeaways: (1) A lot of people who think they are good at UX, aren't. (2) When people in power make mistakes they rarely admit it or undoes their "improvements".
I think Flickr just never figured out what it was for.
I got whiplash from their spastic business decisions. At first it was unlimited storage, and then it became paid storage. It was good for a while and I paid, and then they released the 1TB plan which made my pro plan pointless (and IIRC they promised it’d stay that way forever), so I cancelled the pro plan, and then the next year they reneged and decided to limit the number of photos and started deleting things. Back and forth and back and forth. The end result is I couldn’t rely on Flickr to keep my pictures or even tell me whether I should pay or not, and if so what for.
The other major issue IMO was back when Flickr suddenly decided that “Flickr is for photos” and started actively blacklisting all artwork from search, with no clear definition of the lines between all the massive gray areas this idea opens up, like manually modified photos, digitally modified photos, photos of art, and pure art. I was using Flickr for both pure photos, and mixed photo-art, and pure art. Having a bunch of my images pulled down with very poor justification was pretty demotivating.
I don’t think UI/UX is in the top 3 reasons why I stopped actively using Flickr.
I often think Marissa Mayer would have been great as COO. Not so much as a CEO or Product Designer.
I remember Yahoo had another candidate that planned to turn Yahoo into a media company. Which even at the time I thought was a much better idea and direction. Instead the broad choose Mayer, and try to compete head on with Google.
In some sense it wasn't just Marissa, it was also the board's fault.
>I remember Yahoo had another candidate that planned to turn Yahoo into a media company. Which even at the time I thought was a much better idea and direction. Instead the broad choose Mayer, and try to compete head on with Google.
This is exactly right, and it perfectly highlights the dilemma of Yahoo that made it an unwinnable battle. "Being a media company" would have been a real answer, and a real decision that gave Yahoo a spirit and a direction, and it would have been a declaration that is really true to the soul of Yahoo. However, a media company is just a bad thing to be, and competing with Google was a losing battle.
Probably one of the biggest pieces of revisionist history out there today is that the decline of Yahoo was due to personal mismanagement from Marissa Mayer, when the reality was that Yahoo was in decline and her project was to reverse an existing decline, which was an impossible task. Once that reality is acknowledged, debate will ensue that tries to split the difference about how much is column a, how much is column b, but its beside the point when you step back and realize that Yahoo had fundamental challenges that transcended the tenure of any particular CEO.
I've said it before, but I think that if there were any masterstroke Yahoo could have made to revitalize the company, to accomplish what Google could not, Yahoo really could have successfully launched a social network to compete with Facebook. People had been loyal to Yahoo for decades, plus it had some superstar properties like Tumblr, Flickr and Delicious, along with what might be termed its "legacy" properties like Groups, Answers and their massive email userbase. By contrast Google didn't have anything that behaved like a true organic, living and breathing social network when it launched Plus (well, with the exception of Reader). The puzzle pieces were there.
I find it really strange that Mayer gets the blame for Yahoo’s decline. Yahoo was racing downhill before Mayer was even considered for the CEO role there. I am doubtful anyone could have reversed Yahoo’s fortune. At least when Steve Jobs showed up to save Apple they had a core competency. Frankly Yahoo didn’t.
Yahoo failed to capitalize on search until Google was entrenched. They failed to invest properly in targeted advertising until Google owned that as well. They sat on strategic investments like Flickr until they were nearly dead. They could have sold to Ballmer’s Microsoft for an unjustifiable fortune and somehow they fucked that up, too. They could have bought Google for change and said no.
Yahoo lucked into success. It was literally started as a list of links. They realized people would pay a fortune for banner ads and raked in money hand over first until competent competitors appeared. They started Yahoo Mail which was a great idea but then made it feel low quality by sticking ads in outgoing email and then again just let it sit and rot. They bought a corporate mail app and then just sat on it, too. They didn’t even use it internally. Yahoo managed to treat every market opportunity the way Microsoft treated the post-iPhone mobile market.
I worked at Yahoo during part of this decline. The frustrating thing was that Yahoo couldn’t decide what they were. They kept calling themselves a media company but that didn’t seem to mean anything. They didn’t have a plan to really grow their media presence and they were investing crazy in rebuilding an ad system that they couldn’t convince people to switch to.
When Mayer came on board, lots of people (online at least) claimed that her real job was just to find an acquirer. That might not be far from the truth.
The previous CEOs were also paid to do that job, so yes, it’s extremely strange when people point to Mayer as the problem with Yahoo and not, say, Koogle or Semel, who presided over a decade of bad decisions.
It’s like Mayer was brought in to manage a burning building and everyone acts like she’s incompetent because the fire department couldn’t save what was left.
(P.S. Microsoft was not actually in decline under Ballmer by sane metrics. Microsoft revenue had been climbing consistently. Stock was flat for a very long time though.)
That's an ok eli5 explainer of what a CEO is, but the positions of Microsoft and Yahoo are not remotely analogous, and the blame of Marissa Meyer flies in the face of any kind of appropriate portionality or historical context.
I guess the part where I agree with you is the implicit acknowledgment that blame is merely a function of the job title, and not in any way correlated with any rational analysis of whether those expectations are realistic or accurate reflections of causality.
Marissa Meyer's name is indelibly linked to the Flickr fail. She promoted herself as a UX expert, then "improved" Flickr and ended up f??king it up.
Excerpt from NYT story: “My focus at Google has been to deliver great end-user experiences, to delight and inspire our end users,” Ms. Mayer said in an interview. “That is what I plan to do at Yahoo, give the end user something valuable and delightful that makes them want to come to Yahoo every day.”
I'm just going to note that, as pointed out by the other person, this interpretation is riddled with misinterpretations of the articles, and it's elevating this in a way that's out of proportion to the broader structural forces that led to Yahoo's decline. And, again, the analogy to Microsoft is confused and incorrect, and, again, your comments below suggest that attribution of failure is a function of business norms and not any underlying logic that would satisfy any rational evaluation.
So, it's a good exercise in the confused and incoherent attempts to blame Marissa Mayer in particular for Yahoo's decline.
Right. Imagine if a large passenger jet loses all 4 engines at cruising altitude and then the rudder also stops working. The plane starts gliding toward the ground and the pilot is having no luck at getting it flying again. The pilot finally gives up and says “I can’t fly this thing” and walks away (or is told to walk away). The same thing happens with the copilot. The passengers then select a couple of other passengers with flight experience but they also can’t steer the thing meaningfully. Meanwhile the plane is still rapidly falling out of the sky.
Finally the passengers ask who else is willing to try. Someone steps forward and says, “I can do it. I’ve got experience with engine maintenance.” That person tries and fails to restart the engines and ends up crashing the plane into a field.
Who’s responsible for the plane crash? Is it really the last person who tried to pilot the thing? They took over when the plane had already dropped to 3000 feet. Sure, they clearly failed at the job of flying the heap of busted scrap metal. Maybe they also made a mistake by focusing on engine #3 when engine #4 was more promising in hindsight. But also they stepped in to fly a plane that was about to crash. A crash was the expected outcome at that point by anyone with a clue. It’s wrong to pin it all on them just because they were the last to try. Especially when one of the previous pilots turned down an offer from a huge passing airship to safely bring everyone on board. And maybe that last person is a really incompetent pilot. I’m just not sure how you establish that from what happened here.
(Can you tell that Mayer is the final pilot and Yang turned down the airship offer? It’s some subtle metaphor I’ve got going here.)
Flickr had already failed before Mayer ever showed up at Yahoo. They pretty much ignored it after the purchase aside from forcing yahoo logins.
Mayer’s failure with Flickr is the same as SmugMug’s: an inability to revive a dying product. At least she tried. But also Flickr was hardly the biggest problem at Yahoo.
There are no participation trophies in business. This isn't kindergarten. Before spending shareholder's money on an expensive project she should have checked if it makes sense to spend money on it. If she made the wrong call she alone is responsible for the mistake.
> They pretty much ignored it after the purchase aside from forcing yahoo logins.
Not true. They fully revamped the user experience, and Marissa Mayer was actively involved in the project.
> Before spending shareholder's money on an expensive project she should have checked if it makes sense to spend money on it.
What’s your experience turning failing businesses around? I’m not a huge fan but I find it conspicuous how successfully the CEOs who created the mess have shifted the blame to the one who was hired to fix what was known to be a failing business at the time.
> There are no participation trophies in business. This isn't kindergarten.
Thanks for the regurgitated platitudes. Your stern appraisal of CEOs is duly noted.
> Before spending shareholder's money on an expensive project she should have checked if it makes sense to spend money on it. If she made the wrong call she alone is responsible for the mistake.
On what basis do you assume Flickr’s revamp was an expensive project? I have no idea what it really cost, but to a multi-billion dollar company, I doubt it was really that much.
Sure, she owns the failed revamp though.
> Not true. They fully revamped the user experience, and Marissa Mayer was actively involved in the project.
“They” referred to the company prior to Mayer becoming CEO. Yahoo owned Flickr for 7 years before Mayer took over. Flickr felt stagnant for most of that time.
It’s really weird to be ratholing on Flickr as if it was the reason for Yahoo failing. If Mayer had ignored Flickr like the previous 2 CEOs, Yahoo would have failed just as surely and Flickr’s decline would have been just as rapid.
> It’s really weird to be ratholing on Flickr as if it was the reason for Yahoo failing.
Flickr is the topic of this thread. I don't think Flickr is the reason Yahoo failed, but I do think Marissa Mayer hastened Flickr's demise, and I do believe Ms Mayer's incompetence was the reason Yahoo couldn't be turned around. If you believe Ms Mayer was brought in to "manage a burning building" as opposed to turning it around, please read this story:
It’s really not. Flickr was already circling the drain like the rest of Yahoo. Mayer’s revamp failed but it’s not why block Yahoo failed. It’s not even why Flickr failed. Your pinning of the broader Flickr failure on Mayer is revisionist. The whole reason it needed a revamp was because was already dying.
> Flickr is the topic of this thread.
It wasn’t the topic of the comment I replied to from glenstein. We had a whole sub thread about Yahoo in general.
> I don't think Flickr is the reason Yahoo failed, but I do think Marissa Mayer hastened Flickr's demise, and I do believe Ms Mayer's incompetence was the reason Yahoo couldn't be turned around. If you believe Ms Mayer was brought in to "manage a burning building" as opposed to turning it around, please read this story:
There’s something really off about claiming that Mayer hastened the demise of Yahoo! and then linking to an article essentially saying she should have gutted it sooner.
(Maybe there was something buried at the bottom? I stopped reading because it was all old and well worn.)
Sorry I wasn't clear. COO not in terms of traditional Operation and company structure. But in terms of startup /company hierarchy, as the 2nd person in charge like Tim Cook in Apple and Sheryl Sandberg in Facebook. To Quote Sheryl
>“He basically explained nicely that my job was to do the things that Mark (Zuckerberg) did not want to focus on as much,” Sandberg said of the 2007 meeting that lasted several hours with the chief operating officer of Apple Inc.
“That was his job with Steve (Jobs). And he explained that the job would change over time and I should be prepared for that.”
Marissa shares many similar traits as Tim Cook. Although she seems to be extremely ambitious which might limit the number of CEO she is willing to serve.
The same thing that happened to JC Penney (Ron Johnson). Buying a big name that was lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time with the right idea for the right company doesn't mean you magically get their success.
JC Penney was on its way out, or at least in terminal decline. It did not matter who took the helm, the change to online shopping meant there was going to be consolidation as demand for in person shopping went down.
Even Macys is struggling, and now they have a part of the store that sells basically non returnable junk, like a dollar store.
There is typically only room for 1 or 2 retail businesses now per market segment (how much customers are willing/able to spend).
Macy's seemed to slide significantly downmarket over the last few decades. I feel like, growing up in the 80s and 90s, in a place where they weren't, it was seen as an upper-tier product, a notch below Neiman-Marcus or Saks Fifth Avenue, but decidedly fancier than Penney's or Sears. Then they either went acquisition-mad, or started rebranding other stores they owned (not sure which) because a local chain became Macy's, and it never lived up to that hype.
Now they're doing their own take on Kohl's Kash, which just screams "premium retail experience."
All a reflection of widening income/wealth gaps (but also technology consolidating many businesses). Macys used to have a purpose for middle class, but as fortunes have diverged, we are left with Nordstroms serving the 80th to 95th percentile, and then Macys and the rest fighting to retain market share of the bottom 4 quintiles that have been losing purchasing power.
Probably an acquisition. In 2005, Macy's bought May Department Stores, which owned a large number of regional department stores. May liked letting each chain have their own identity, but Macy's just wanted everything in their business to bear the Macy's name, so after the May acquisition closed storied brands such as Marshall Field's, Foley's, and Robinsons-May disappeared off the face of the Earth.
It used to be well organised grid-ordered thumbnails (regularly displayed even when from different aspect ratios) on a white background that made picture stand out, with titles and descriptions as first citizens. Ipernity (http://www.ipernity.com/explore/whatshot) kept more or less that appearance, if you want to see).
Then in 2012 or 2013, they 'modernised' it into the current one: glued pictures with almost no separation and 100% screen occupation making an irregular patchwork; no title/description if you don't hover, I guess to accommodate a growing number of people who dumped their memory card without captioning their photos, and often without sorting them.
I think this gets at an insightful issue - In Flickr's heyday, much of its userbase was professional, aspiring, and amateur photographers who were effectively power users. They viewed Flickr as something like an extension of Lightroom, so they used it for storage but also curated their public profile, lists, etc in a sort of proto-Instagram way.
When Flickr repositioned post Yahoo acquisition, it felt like it was aiming for more of a Google Photos-type use-case that was very passive and "it just works", which felt very different from how it had been popular before. I think history bears out that this was a poor decision, we don't really have major players now that glue those styles of usage together like Flickr did. I think it just required a higher level of effort in both the software and the users, and once Flickr pushed away the audience that enjoyed that level of effort to try to acquire a more set-and-forget audience it lost the first and failed to appeal much to the second.
I think the old core Flickr userbase often went to 500px, which I don't like as much but is closer to Flickr in the good old days.
I was actually surprised looking at it myself, I've never been a 500px user but have been linked to it before. It seems like they did a pretty big redesign in the last couple of years and... now push NFTs. Swell.
Yes. They also introduced infinite scrolling which meant that you could no longer jump to see the early part (or first photo) of a photostream (your own or anyone else's)
That and the attempt to introduce social media aspects: you got notifications that said 'here are some people you might know'. Which I never did. If they said 'here are some photographers whose work you might like' it would have been closer to the original intent.
Lots of annoyances like these drove me away from the site, and I never went back (or renewed my pro membership). Over time, they gradually undid the worst changes, but it was too late by then.
One thing that I did take away, though, was my Flickr username [0], which got repurposed for HN :-)
Truthfully, as a user, I like the patchwork approach, or maybe have gotten used to it due to others sites using a similar design (DeviantArt, 500px). Without text and border I find pictures stand out more. But they could've kept the old one as an option. Also having an option for always active title/description in the new one would've been nice.
