bulldogs
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Court overturns Apple's $120M patent win against Samsung
realistic said:Why bother trying to innovate when the courts won't allow you to protect the patents with judgements. -
Sharp reportedly accepts $6.25B takeover bid from Foxconn
brakken said:Oh well. That's the end of Japanese commercial tech hardware.
I wish they'd been able to keep Sharp Japanese.
Good luck, Foxy! -
iPhone controlled 40% of US smartphone market in 2015, data shows
chas_m said:cnocbui said:Samsung must have gained ground because of all those Android users jumping ship to iPhone 6s. -
Apple Music update lets Android users save songs to SD cards
redefiler said:msantti said:Wow.
A feature Apple denies us. -
Yahoo prepares for split, will lay off 15% of workforce in restructuring
williamh said:ireland said:What would you do to save Yahoo!
The fact that we don't use Yahoo isn't exactly a failure of Yahoo's, it's just that their "directory" is an anachronism from the time before search engines. How many things have to go wrong in the world for us to go back to that?
And that is just desktop. Not only did Yahoo fail to join Google and Microsoft in creating their own mobile OS, but they were very late creating a mobile presence. When they finally did deliver mobile apps, they were very terrible and limited. To this day, Yahoo's mobile offerings are far behind that of Microsoft and Google. Yahoo should have been in the perfect position to benefit from mobile. Where Google and Microsoft were competing with each other - and Apple - with their own mobile OS and devices. They should have been in the best position to be able to work out deals to get their apps and services featured on other operating systems because they were the only one without a system of their own to create conflict of interest. They didn't. Also, becoming a cloud company? Trying to offer enterprise products? They didn't even try.
Yahoo's main problem is that they tried to transition from being a tech company into being a media company. Remember: they bought Time Warner. Their big thing was providing news and entertainment content because that was what most people searched for. Their goal was essentially to replace network and cable television and also replace the newspaper and the magazine. There were problems with that. First, they got into and tried to redefine media right when the value of media began to decline. Buying Time Warner was the equivalent of buying a horse buggy company right before the invention of the automobile. Second, the technology wasn't there yet. This was before actual broadband Internet, and it was even before video sharing/search sites like YouTube. And no, Yahoo didn't do squat to develop the tech that they needed. Third: they were REALLY BAD at being a media company anyway, so even if media were still a valuable growing area and the tech was there, they would have still failed.
Contrast Yahoo with the companies that survived: Google and Amazon. Instead of trying to transition from being a tech company to being a media company, Google and Amazon increased their tech expertise. They started offering cloud products, enterprise solutions, operating systems (well Google anyway) ... they even started selling hardware. Google and Amazon survived - and got stronger - by becoming more like Microsoft and Oracle instead of trying to be the Disney of the Internet.
As for Marissa Meyer: she made it worse. Sorry, but a lot of people always did say that she was just a photogenic personality to market Facebook, and based on her leadership of Yahoo, they were right. And no, her being a woman does not make saying this sexist. Meyer came on board and just did everything that Yahoo was failing at before, except did it worse. Instead of hiring a bunch of developers to create mobile apps - or even an OS to compete with Android and Chrome OS - she brings in a bunch of journalists and writers to create content. Instead of creating a presence in the cloud for their own products and to sell to consumers and enterprises, she hires Katie Couric to be a "global news anchor" to upload video newscasts. She buys Tumblr because she wanted to get Yahoo into social networking, but there is no real way to turn Tumblr into a major revenue source. She had none of the tech knowledge required to transform Yahoo into a company that could actually compete with Google, Facebook and Microsoft. Her business skills were terrible and she also had no real expertise in the content and media directions that she had Yahoo invest so much in. Paying the NFL to live stream games over the Internet? Verizon was doing that already, and with much better tech. Trying to compete with Netflix and Amazon by running the last season of the very low rated "Community", a show only liked by TV critics?
Yahoo could have been saved. It is just that Meyer was the wrong one to save it. Do any of you doubt that Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Hugo Barra etc. - people who actually know something about tech and have management ability - would have been able to save Yahoo?