> what do you do when you don't have the talent pool to continue to innovate and can't even grow it?
I'm sure Yahoo still has a big talent pool. Don't really know how they managed to do it as it doesn't really make sense, however if you want some proof of that, take a look at: http://developer.yahoo.com/everything.html (speaking of which, did you know that Apache Hadoop was initiated and is still led by Yahoo?)
> So far Yahoo's response has been "buy them and let them operate independently."
Actually that wasn't Yahoo's behaviour in the past. Delicious for example stagnated after they began rewriting/redesigning it, as they wanted Delicious to be "integrated" with Yahoo's network. Development eventually grinned to a halt. If Yahoo would have kept Flickr or Delicious operating independently, then both would be a lot bigger than they are today.
Yahoo also did a stupid move when they sold Delicious. But at the very least they sold it, instead of shutting it down, like Google did with Reader.
> People go to work at Google to work at Google, not to work at a subsidiary of Google.
Well, no, you're talking about the poor fools that go through that awful interview process without caring about what they'll end-up working on, being assigned on Calendar, or on fixing bugs of internal tools, or on some project destined for some African country that nobody will ever hear about, or on some other soul-sucking activity with the only thing to show for being a Google T-shirt.
Google is still a good brand among employers and it's still something to be able to say that you're working at Google, however, like all other big software companies, Google got too big and those with a minimal internal knowledge of how things work there know for a fact that it really isn't the glamorous place to work at, unless you're lucky.
> Yahoo hasn't been an engineer's company for a very, very long time, and I don't see them taking strides to fix that
I can't possibly imagine how in the world would you know that, unless you worked for them. Well did you?
> on some project destined for some African country that nobody will ever hear about,
Uh, bringing a billion people onto the Internet for the first time, and turning the 3rd world into the 1st world, isn't most people's definition of soul-sucking.
I'm sure Yahoo still has a big talent pool. Don't really know how they managed to do it as it doesn't really make sense, however if you want some proof of that, take a look at: http://developer.yahoo.com/everything.html (speaking of which, did you know that Apache Hadoop was initiated and is still led by Yahoo?)
> So far Yahoo's response has been "buy them and let them operate independently."
Actually that wasn't Yahoo's behaviour in the past. Delicious for example stagnated after they began rewriting/redesigning it, as they wanted Delicious to be "integrated" with Yahoo's network. Development eventually grinned to a halt. If Yahoo would have kept Flickr or Delicious operating independently, then both would be a lot bigger than they are today.
Yahoo also did a stupid move when they sold Delicious. But at the very least they sold it, instead of shutting it down, like Google did with Reader.
> People go to work at Google to work at Google, not to work at a subsidiary of Google.
Well, no, you're talking about the poor fools that go through that awful interview process without caring about what they'll end-up working on, being assigned on Calendar, or on fixing bugs of internal tools, or on some project destined for some African country that nobody will ever hear about, or on some other soul-sucking activity with the only thing to show for being a Google T-shirt.
Google is still a good brand among employers and it's still something to be able to say that you're working at Google, however, like all other big software companies, Google got too big and those with a minimal internal knowledge of how things work there know for a fact that it really isn't the glamorous place to work at, unless you're lucky.
> Yahoo hasn't been an engineer's company for a very, very long time, and I don't see them taking strides to fix that
I can't possibly imagine how in the world would you know that, unless you worked for them. Well did you?