Kenneth's Rants and Other Things

It was a stunning failure in vision, and more or less the same thing happened at Flickr. All Yahoo cared about was the database its users had built and tagged. It didnt care about the community that had created it or more importantly continuing to grow that community by introducing new features.

“We spent a lot of time in meetings with CorpDev just defending the product and justifying our decisions,” said a former Flickr team member.

And so when Flickr hit the ground at Yahoo it was crushed with engineering and service requirements it had to meet as per demands of the acquisition integration team. Those were a drain on resources, human and financial. Even though many of the resources came from Yahoo, they were debited against Flickr. This created an untenable cycle that actively hampered innovation.

via How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet.

HBO claims that (a) people aren’t interested in a la carte HBO Go and (b) the transaction costs are too high to do their own billing, etc. The technical term for these explanations is “bullshit.”

via What’s HBO Go’s Problem? – Megan McArdle – Business – The Atlantic.