Comments on: Did Yahoo sow the seeds of its own demise with Hadoop?

By: Jo Maitland

Jo Maitland — Tue, 15 May 2012 19:42:54 +0000

Yahoo is failing because all the best people left and went to Google, FB, Twitter anywhere but Yahoo. Ditto Microsoft.

By: Andrew Newman

Andrew Newman — Mon, 14 May 2012 19:23:20 +0000

Remember that Hadoop was open sourced around the time Microsoft was going to buy it the first time? A great idea if Yahoo became a Microsoft shop and you wanted to keep using it.

Hadoop is taught at Unis and there are thousands of projects built around it – it’d be a great way to leverage if you were a tech company – see cool projects and reuse or buy. But since when was Yahoo a tech company?

Technology is not why Yahoo is failing.

By: Derrick Harris

Derrick Harris — Mon, 14 May 2012 14:36:34 +0000

I agree and disagree. I think infrastructure is a competitive advantage, if only a small one, re: saving money and improving performance. I think Hadoop is actually more strategic, in that it really can let you display content in more effective ways or otherwise use data to your advantage.

The key, though, is to improve the core business while also developing these complementary technologies. Facebook and Google do that well. Otherwise, as with many NoSQL projects (or Cloudera or Hortonworks, which Yahoo has a stake in), make the technology the business.

By: Yuvamani

Yuvamani — Mon, 14 May 2012 06:37:56 +0000

If Yahoo did not do Hadoop, some one else would have done it. Take the NoSQL databases as an example, There was a clear need for a Dynamo from Amazon or Big Table from Google. And so somebody did MongoDB, Somebody did Redis, Somebody did couchdb. And yes Facebook open sourced Cassandra, But ended up using HBase from Hadoop.

There was a clear need for a good map reduce system and somebody did it. To Yahoos credit they did the best and most popular one. I do not think the infrastructure itself is a competitive advantage in web land anymore although companies *have to* necessarily spend a lot of money and engineering on scaling their web infra !

Take Google+ vs Facebook. All of googles infra and all of googles data centers does not make any difference in the social war.

By: Derrick Harris

Derrick Harris — Mon, 14 May 2012 03:35:14 +0000

IT doesn’t generally give a sustainable advantage, I don’t think, but it can give a temporary one to early adopters. Even if Yahoo did everything right re: Hadoop, though, it never improved the core Yahoo platform simultaneously. When new competition comes along, there’s a vastly improved Hadoop thanks to Yahoo, but not a vastly improved Yahoo.

By: Amirhossein

Amirhossein — Mon, 14 May 2012 01:39:57 +0000

It’s been said that information technology in general cannot bring competitive advantage since it is not sustainable. The same is true for Hadoop. I cannot judge if the open source nature of Hadoop make the sistainability issue worse.

By: Om Malik

Om Malik — Mon, 14 May 2012 00:09:07 +0000

I couldn’t disagree with you more. I think their game is over.

By: thescarletnumbers

thescarletnumbers — Sun, 13 May 2012 21:36:38 +0000

I really hope that yahoo makes some significant changes. Yahoo perhaps is the only company that could actually become bigger than google if they make the correct decsions. I think that people have grown to dislike google so much that they would be willing to give yahoo a second chance.