Ray just sent me an interesting article about comparing the cultures of Yahoo! and Google. It wasn’t so much about life at the companies, or about our differing approach to our products, but really more about the culture of innovation.
I really only know one side of the story, what it has been like to be an engineer at Yahoo! for the past three years. The article claims that Yahoo! is very by-the-numbers company that has to “goose” its engineers into coming up with creative ideas. I have to say that I disagree with that quite a bit. The alleged goosing came in the form of of some corny internal marketing posters advertising the creation of the Idea Factory.
The Idea Factory is an internal site where any Yahoo! that has an idle thought for improving a Yahoo! product can write a quick post and have it read by the relevant product, engineering, and design teams. I could spend 52 days out of the year working on personal projects like a Google engineer but only implement a fraction of the ideas I might come up with in the year.
Forgetting for the moment that non-engineers are every bit as creative as engineers, there is also the matter that I might have ideas on products that I use/am interested in, but am not qualified to build. In those cases, I’m happy to forward the idea on to the relevant team and work on projects that are more interesting to me or my group.
Aside from the factory, innovation is very much alive at Yahoo! in the form of grassroots groups and specialized groups for exploring the many ideas that are springing up all over the place. Actually, I owe my employment at Yahoo! to innovation and people willing to take on side projects. I was hired on at Yahoo! to take over on IMVironments as it moved from side project to official product. The project had been the idea and personal project of one of my co-workers, Chris Szeto (who left Yahoo! for Google, and is now back to Yahoo!).
From what I’ve heard about the two companies on all levels I am very sure that I am in the right place. Yahoo! is the right mix of geek and corporate maturity for me. I would write more but I’m working on several projects I find interesting and innovative and I want to get back to them.
Digg this!
June 22nd, 2005 at 7:36 pm
Beautifully written and I completely agree with your views. There have been several incidents of non-tech folks reporting wonderful ideas to tech-folks. 1-day-a-week thingy is probably going to end up idling up the non-tech folks? Or maybe I’m wrong
June 22nd, 2005 at 11:31 pm
Excellent reply to that article Justin. I like the fact that a qualified person has pointed out the fact that:
“non-engineers are every bit as creative as engineers”
I am in this situation and I am mostly payed for this and I know what that means. Spending 52 days a year on a personal project will be just a waiste of time without a tech team backing me up.
Of course some Google guy might replay that they have only qualified engineers..
June 24th, 2005 at 7:14 am
The developers at Yahoo! have done a better job for me, so far.
I’m a Yahoo! Mail devotee among a gaggle of GMail chauvinist friends, and I’m quite happy. I organize my life with Yahoo! Mail, Addresses and Calendar. If I had a PDA, it would sync with my Yahoo!. When someone sends me a Yahoo! Invitation, I add it to my calendar with one (and then one more) click. The email interface is 100% intuitive, completing my form entries the right way the first time, almost every time, and I don’t have to navigate in the obtuse page order that GMail demands to send an email to a lot of people on my list.
For people who want what’s hot, GMail may be the thing, but for anyone who wants more features and a more transparent interface, YMail is superior by far.
I also have my own anecdotal evidence that the Google Search Engine is falling behind Yahoo! and MSN in the quantity and quality of search results… even if those were flukes it certainly confirms for me that there is no result dominance, and therefore no intellectual dominance, in the current search engine battle.
Keep it up, Yahoo!
June 24th, 2005 at 9:44 am
thanks greg always good to hear
and thanks for linking to my blog!
June 25th, 2005 at 2:35 pm
Re: Y!Mail vs Gmail
GMail has in its favour:
-POP/SMTP accessibility (yahoo.com wants you to pay for that)
-Security all the way through if you want it, both in the web interface(SSL) and the POP/SMTP stuff. Yahoo doesn’t allow SSL for the webmail and the free POP access that Yahoo UK provides is completely unsecured. I once watched an Ethereal sniff session while my mail cient was checking mail and saw my username and password being transmitted in the clear, which gave me pause for thought. I’ve since stopped using the Y!’s POP stuff. A shame that.
- Labels. Great stuff, much better than plain folders, even though they lack hierarchy.
- Useful addressing tricks: user.name+whatever@gmail.com is the same as username@gmail.com. This allows some useful filtering to be done.
- Ever-increasing storage.
- A nice and fast (most of the time) interface, though not perfect.
Y!Mail still has a lot of catching up to do.
February 7th, 2007 at 9:23 pm
Hey, thanks for that.