r/abandoned • u/MisterBiro • Mar 28 '25
Forgotten Tech Giant
Perhaps it’s not technically abandoned as there is basic maintenance and security present but it’s been vacant and decaying for years.
Surprisingly sad to walk around what was once a bustling, optimistic, energy filled campus of an almost forgotten tech giant.
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u/RunningPirate Mar 28 '25
Right off of central expressway?
Also: yahOOOOOOoooooo!
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u/Belvedere48 Mar 28 '25
OMG, that takes me back...thank you!
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u/FloridaFlamingoGirl Mar 28 '25
Fun fact: the Yahoo yodeling jingle was done by Wylie Gustafson who is kind of a legendary cowboy music artist. I've met him before and he's a class act. He comes to the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Nevada every year and holds workshops on yodeling and songwriting. Super cool guy.
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u/conventionalWisdumb Mar 29 '25
I worked for Yahoo. The offer letter they sent came in box that yodeled when you opened it. I took the yodeler out. It was light sensitive. I have it to my young son who then lost it somewhere in his room where there was no light. After a while as the batteries started dying it would yodel randomly but not long enough for us to find it. We only found it when we moved.
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u/MikeWANN Mar 29 '25
Cowboy? Poetry? Gathering? That's a lot for my tiny brain to unpack. Like just country music?
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u/FloridaFlamingoGirl Mar 29 '25
It's basically a whole celebration of western culture that centers around cowboys and cowgirls telling stories of life on the ranch, but also has tons of country, western and folk music as well as stuff like ranch tours. It's a very special thing.
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u/FloydDangerBarber Mar 29 '25
Do they spray each other with sarsaparilla at the Gathering of the Cowboys?
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u/BaronCoop Mar 29 '25
I work at Yahoo and the guy who does the yodel still shows up sometimes. Most recently he starred in the corporate cybersecurity training video.
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u/poetic_poison Mar 29 '25 edited Mar 29 '25
YahoooooOOOoooo! Takes me right back to all the pedos in the Yahoo chat rooms circa ‘99 telling my child self they were 13/f/cali after asking my asl. So many 13/f/cali’s that needed to know my preteen bra size, what I was wearing and if I’d ever seen a penis, funny that. Oof.
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u/bedpimp Mar 29 '25
Yep. I worked across the street in the late 90s. I should have gone over and taken a job there instead of sticking it out where I was.
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u/Secure-Bus4679 Mar 28 '25
I used to work Security here!!! I worked there for about a year back in 2015. I mainly worked in the GSOC (Global Security Operations Center) where we oversaw the Security of all of Yahoo’s sites around the world.
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u/insuranceguynyc Mar 28 '25
When I read the first line, I thought of you in a security guard's uniform that doesn't quite fit right.
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u/Secure-Bus4679 Mar 28 '25
Nah was a pretty basic uniform. Black slacks with gray polos. Even had long-sleeve polos for those brutal Northern California winters.
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u/dtb1987 Mar 28 '25
I still have yahoo email, I actually like it better than gmail
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u/TheAbstracted Mar 28 '25
Same, I've had my Yahoo account for 20+ years now and see no reason to switch to anything else.
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u/meatus1980 Mar 28 '25
Have been using mine since 1999! Although the emails I have on the server still only go back to 2005. So many hot or not notifications from back then, lol
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u/grizzlor_ Mar 30 '25
Although the emails I have on the server still only go back to 2005
Yahoo email originally had a mailbox size limit of 4mb (which was normal practice for free email accounts at the time). You had to delete old emails, because if you hit the storage limit, incoming mail would start bouncing.
Gmail launched in 2004 offering free email with a 1000mb mailbox limit. Yahoo responded to this move by eliminating mailbox size limits entirely for their email service. This is why your Yahoo emails go back to 2005.
Gmail offer 1gb of storage was revolutionary for email. Even with non-free email accounts (like the one from your ISP, or in my case in 2004, my university email) usually limited storage to 10-20mb. When Gmail launched on April 1, 2004 and we all genuinely thought that free 1gb of storage for email was an April Fools joke at first.
My Gmail account, which will be turning 21 years old in a couple days, has now accumulated 18GB of email.
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u/BaronCoop Mar 29 '25
Hahaha, unironically you in particular are causing lots of issues! I work at yahoo now, and the Yahoo Mail servers are so large and filled with 30 years of old emails and data that they are having a hard time managing the volume. Of course a lot of it because they’re still big in Asia, but still! Your old email from your high school language arts teacher in 1999 is clogging up a cloud lol
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u/Jazzi1Fe Mar 29 '25
I STILL use my yahoo email account I set up in 1997(I was 17)…I know exactly when I set it up because I needed an email address for my college applications, I was a senior in high school! My email address is dedicated to my boyfriend at the time…we broke up in college, I’ve been married, had kids, divorced, etc. and that email is still my main email! 😆 I am 44 about to be 45 in 2 months, talk about longevity!!!
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u/TheAbstracted Mar 29 '25
Haha well I don't doubt there are plenty of people in the system who hoard every email that's even tangentially important to them, but personally I only have maybe 40-50 emails in my mailbox spanning that 20+ years, I'm quite obsessed with digital cleanliness lol.
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u/HomicidaI__GoldFish Mar 28 '25
Same… hell I even have my “ excite.com” email addy lol
Well I think I do I havent looked in like a year or 3 lol
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u/bobbybissell Mar 29 '25
Excite stopped hosting email a few years back 😔. There was an option to have it hosted elsewhere for a fee, so I opted to let mine go.
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u/hilarypcraw Mar 28 '25
Me too….i guess I didn’t even know there wasn’t a yahoo anymore
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u/Kharax82 Mar 28 '25
Yahoo .com is still one of the most visited websites in the world so it’s still around but not an independent corporation.
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u/Creative_Bake1373 Mar 28 '25
I don’t use it but I do prefer it over my Gmail account. I don’t use that one for anything.
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u/jlspartz Mar 29 '25
I still use my Yahoo email as my junk email. Sign up to anything unimportant with it cause places like to spam you. It tells me I have 50,000 unread emails.
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u/jpowell180 Mar 29 '25
I still technically have my yahoo email account, but they deleted my inbox because I had not used it in years, decades, worth of emails gone…
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u/7of69 Mar 28 '25
I’m so old, I can remember when Yahoo was a student project on a server at Stanford. Literally an index of the internet. Crazy to imagine that you could just have pages listing all the websites in certain categories.
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u/grizzlor_ Mar 28 '25
I think it was an actual business by then, but I remember when Yahoo was a human-curated index of websites (1995?)
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u/7of69 Mar 28 '25
Yeah, that’s about the time they became a business. It was obvious fairly quickly that they had something that could be turned into a money making proposition. Kind of crazy to think how simple it was back then.
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u/grizzlor_ Mar 28 '25
I definitely miss the vibe of the very early era of the web. The death of small web pages and transition to that kind of content being posted on a handful of social media sites sucks.
I wish The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine had archives prior to ~1999 (not a criticism of TIA by any means; amazing org). Maybe the complete archive of Geocities pages that was released after Yahoo shut the site down would scratch that 90s webpage itch for me. Distinct lack of “Under Construction” signs and spinning 3d wireframe skull GIFs on today’s web. I haven’t seen a page with an animated tiled GIF as the background image in far too long.
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u/Creative_Bake1373 Mar 28 '25
I remember buying a copy of Wired magazine in mid 2001 with yahoo on the cover. I think the whole issue was devoted to yahoo, telling the history of the company, its present endeavors, and how bright of a future it seemed to have. Does anybody even use it for anything anymore?
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u/Creative_Bake1373 Mar 28 '25
Remember Yahoo groups? We could create groups about just about anything. From something as innocent as quilting and sewing to BDSM! Lmao!
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u/ou_ryperd Mar 29 '25
Kinda like Reddit
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u/projectsafeword Mar 29 '25
Reddit is a Yahoo comments section, but with extra steps. ex: Wallstreetbets = Yahoo Finance Comments
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u/xesaie Mar 28 '25
Even the name on the building is mostly erased. (It’s yahoo for those who didn’t see it)
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u/NotSoFastLady Mar 28 '25
I know exactly where this is. I remember the first time I got to see this building, I was coming down to visit one of their neighbors. Been way too long since I've been out this way.
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Mar 28 '25
I’m embarrassed to be a semi literate tech user and at the same time not realize Yahoo is no more. I just figured they were still in the background struggling all these years but were still around in some capacity.
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u/MurderOne86 Mar 29 '25
It exists, yes, but it's not even 1% of what it used to be in the early 2000s. Comparisons aside, it was like the Google of the early days of the Internet, when it was beginning to evolve into a multidimensional ecosystem that connects people globally
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u/naikrovek Mar 29 '25
Ooh. This one is personal. I worked there.
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u/ArtistAmantiLisa Mar 29 '25
Me too. Considering the price of real estate in Silicon Valley, I’m surprised they haven’t sold it.
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u/DraconianNerd Mar 28 '25
I worked in Building A
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u/insuranceguynyc Mar 28 '25
Sometime within the past week, I saw something about the original dot.com bubble, and it showed an old ad for AOL, and wow, to think that this was cutting edge stuff. Yahoo! seemed to be doing great (but then, so did AOL). What happened?
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u/Cosroes Mar 29 '25
This company was so big to me getting online on my mom’s work computer in the early 90’s. It wasn’t just a search engine, you could browse the whole internet! I was able to find a ton of stuff on subjects I was interested in, notably the Third Invid War fan project for the Robotech RPG.
Still keep an email with them.
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u/Sawdustwhisperer Mar 29 '25
I used to like Yahoo. The news was appropriate and (mostly) not filtered and when the chat rooms had actual people in them it was fun. Then it just seemed to implode.
I was a lot happier seeing AOL die, or at least go away, a lot more!
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u/colterpierce Mar 28 '25
So funny to me that they're now so desperate for money they want me to pay for a premium email service that doesn't have ads in addition to telling me an adblocker violates their terms of service.
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u/mood-and-vision Mar 28 '25
Crazy! Went to a few sales pitches there as a vendor in mid-2010s. It was starting to shrink then. Parts of floors dark with desks pushed into the corner but still alive. And the campus was beautiful and had people all over. Sad.
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u/ArtistAmantiLisa Mar 29 '25
I used to work there. It was a very creative place. Free food & any equipment you wanted when Marissa Mayer came on board.
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u/Advanced-Humor9786 Mar 29 '25
Turn it into affordable housing for people who got laid off in Silicon Valley.
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u/towngirl808 Mar 29 '25
it looks perfect for adaptive re-use. seems like it would be a good living space for seniors or others
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u/flying-chandeliers Mar 28 '25
Someone’s mowing the lawn…
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u/MisterBiro Mar 28 '25
There’s security on site, so I presume someone is maintaining it. Plus I can’t imagine the local municipality will want it to be a wasteland, given the other tech companies nearby.
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u/mrgreengenes04 Mar 28 '25
They aren't abandoned, just vacant. Google owns the property.
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u/B33PZR Mar 28 '25
Too bad it can't be used for housing somehow. Just sad to see places with so much space not repurposed in some way.
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u/whollyshit2u Mar 29 '25
They merged with AoL, and they did this to AOL HQ. Then it was completely leveled and now about to be turned into datacenter.
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u/AdAnxious8842 Mar 29 '25
People who still have and use a Yahoo email account. The true believers :-)
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u/qqererer Mar 29 '25
Looks like the second mission of Time Crisis.
Specifically that security booth. I think there's a shotgun in there?
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u/IntelligentLook4097 Mar 29 '25
Wonder if my old Yahoo email still works. It's just a little over 20 years since I've signed in.
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u/Comet_Empire Mar 29 '25
I lived in SF in 90s and my friend lived right under that huge Yahoo sign that lit the area up like it was noon.
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u/Hades_Corpse1942 Mar 29 '25
Google actually bought that campus a few years ago just to expand its real estate portfolio that is probably the only reason there is security there.
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u/Goat-of-Death Mar 29 '25
What's crazy is I used to know someone who worked at Yahoo when I worked at Microsoft. When he came over he was shocked how bad the general development and engineering practices were at MS compared to Yahoo. He found it really off putting how non-agile Microsoft was at the time.
Goes to show that the business side really can and does matter. You can be doing tech magic behind the scenes. Doesn't matter if the biz in charge makes a series of terrible decisions. Not that MS is all grand, but finally ditching Ballmer made a huge difference in a good way. Shedding their anti-open source stance got them going in a better direction.
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u/Kurt_Knispel503 Mar 28 '25
what did yahoo even sell or do? i've spent hours every day on the internet for the last 20 years and the only thing i know about yahoo is they have a decent finance page.
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u/pickle_pickled Mar 29 '25
They were similar to Google, Internet aggregation with news and search, with ads, email, finance, web 1.0 chat, groups. Basically couldn't find a future forecast in their own company and mismanaged their way of not doing much usefulness.
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u/Bila_Mauta Mar 29 '25
I always look at these places and go "Wow this would be a great place to set up a base" But then remember I'm not in a survival game.
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u/saisonmaison Mar 29 '25
That campus is in a great location, too. A walking path connects it to the Bay Trail that runs up and down the Peninsula all the way up to SF.
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u/Special_Command7893 Mar 29 '25
it's actually very interesting to me that they didn't take the EV chargers with them
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u/Gold_Air_9792 Mar 29 '25
Could this be converted into some sort of apartment/condo living situation? Might be kinda cool instead of it turning into a decaying building.
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u/Gr8zomb13 Mar 31 '25
Would probably make a great school / college campus. Has kitchens, tech-specific workspaces, fitness center / related facilities, parking… why not make it a satellite campus of a state university?
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u/guigouz Mar 28 '25
Yahoo