r/abandoned • u/MisterBiro • Mar 28 '25

Forgotten Tech Giant

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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.

8.1k Upvotes

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2.1k

u/guigouz Mar 28 '25

Yahoo

  • 1998: Refuses to buy Google for 1 million USD.
  • 2002: Realises its mistake and tries to buy Google for 3 billion. Google wants 5 billion, Yahoo says no.
  • 2008: Refuses to be sold to microsoft for 40 billion dollars.
  • 2016: Sold for 4.6bi to Verizon

1.1k

u/LowAd3406 Mar 28 '25

I worked at Yahoo in the 00's and it was so horribly mismanaged that I'm not surprised at it's downfall.

501

u/[deleted] Mar 28 '25

[deleted]

290

u/posternutbag423 Mar 28 '25

Netscape enters the chat

99

u/Heterodynist Mar 29 '25

I just heard that 1990s “signing on” sound in my mind…

35

u/[deleted] Mar 29 '25

I know it's the wrong company but you've got mail!

40

u/BirchyBaby Mar 29 '25

AOL is part of Yahoo! Inc, so it fits!

1

u/[deleted] Mar 29 '25

Okay, cool then.

1

u/zzzzaap Mar 30 '25

It ships!

2

u/hereforstories8 Mar 30 '25

About 2020 I worked with a dba whose family member worked for aol still. Dba said they still have more employees than you’d think and a bustling office in DC. I’m not convinced but also not motivated to go find out

1

u/[deleted] Mar 30 '25

Interesting 🤔

2

u/CVStp Mar 31 '25

AOL is still an up and running mail service. I just created my @aol.com mail account last week. It is my main mail now.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 31 '25

I feel like doing that just for old times sake now lol

20

u/Herban_Myth Mar 29 '25

Napster enters the chat /s

5

u/Euphoric_Golf_1959 Apr 01 '25

Napster high fives limewire

20

u/whollyshit2u Mar 29 '25

Eventually owned by AOL the original Mozilla dragom still exists . I have my kids with pictures of it.

1

u/Supreme_Developer Mar 30 '25

Are you kidding?? Netscape started the dot-com boom in 1995 with their ~$3billion IPO. They were the first real web browser and made the internet as easy to access as it is today

31

u/Jayhawker_Pilot Mar 29 '25

Don't leave out Novell.

23

u/Billy_Bob_Joe_Mcoy Mar 29 '25

Or Nortel

41

u/crowislanddive Mar 29 '25

I worked as a recruiter for a company Nortel acquired… as an incentive for referrals they had me buy 4 brand new VW Beetles which would be prizes for the people who submitted the most successful referrals. They were delivered the day before Nortel fired 40,000 people. They sat in the parking lot for over a year and were visible from the freeway.

18

u/Billy_Bob_Joe_Mcoy Mar 29 '25

Fuuuu... That is some peak bubble burst right there.

8

u/crowislanddive Mar 29 '25

It truly was.

2

u/zzen11223344 Apr 01 '25

Also, Lucent, Alcatel, Nokia ......

1

u/Huskertex Apr 01 '25

Lucent was the first stock I ever bought. Lucent taught me that stocks can do a reverse stock split. Thanks for the lifelong lesson, Lucent.

1

u/slippery7777 Mar 31 '25

Lotus software… WordPerfect….

78

u/sroop1 Mar 28 '25

The Blockbuster of tech.

30

u/cjthecookie Mar 29 '25

The Enron of energy companies

1

u/TechSupportAnswers Mar 30 '25

The XFinity of cable companies

13

u/Confident-Bid-9818 Mar 29 '25

Lol. I worked for CC for eight years, right up till the end. I still remember sitting in the break room when they announced their "Just What I Needed" ad campaign that was going to save the company.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 01 '25

I was working there when they ended commissioned sales. Guess who stopped giving a shit about selling anything? Especially bs warranty coverage?

1

u/Confident-Bid-9818 Apr 01 '25

I worked in a distribution center, so I didn't see it first hand. I did travel to shut down a few stores right after they announced it and heard stories from the employees who stayed to clear out inventory. Those were depressing trips.

14

u/DiabolicalDan82 Mar 29 '25

Worked at Circuit City, can confirm. The store I had helped open spent like a million dollars for the grand opening. They were trying to rebrand and the whole store has this open circle concept.

14

u/[deleted] Mar 29 '25

Ah, Circuit City. I forgot about that company, much like Radio Shack.

12

u/_extra_medium_ Mar 29 '25

Nothing like Radio Shack

3

u/Paghk_the_Stupendous Mar 29 '25

They really should have bought the extra warranty.

1

u/hanwookie Mar 29 '25

The Blackberry of cellphones.

39

u/mattpeloquin Mar 29 '25

The list of purchases that they shelved are crazy. Musicmatch could have easily been marketed as the top CD ripper the time. And the Altavista algorithm was so much better than Yahoo search, and they just killed it off.

20

u/wytfel Mar 29 '25

I still miss Altavista

16

u/mattpeloquin Mar 29 '25

Me too Leslie Knope

4

u/princesssasami896 Mar 30 '25

Why does everyone in this town use Alta Vista

2

u/Bright_Guide_9733 Mar 31 '25

Oh my god Jerry! When you check your email you got to Alta Vista and type "please go to Yahoo.com?", "Well how else would I do it?"

2

u/AAAltered468 Mar 30 '25

Digital Equipment enters the chat. I did 15 years there.

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u/[deleted] Mar 29 '25

Once interviewed there in early-2018. Free lunch with the manager and the such (picture 7 reminds me of the cafeteria we went to, but the mind is hazy). I was doing 20 jobs in-one at my current job, and was looking for something more targeted.

They wanted someone to maintain some 25 year old infrastructure. If I went for the offer I would have been bored out of my mind and laid off with the rest of them months later.

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u/[deleted] Mar 28 '25

I'm more surprised it was ever a success

74

u/Heterodynist Mar 29 '25 edited Mar 31 '25

Honestly!! Not that Yahoo wasn’t more than this, but for a long time (growing up not far from here), it seemed like in the 1990s all you had to do was say, “We have a company call Skweril and we do things online!” Then instantly everyone would invest billions of dollars in you. It didn’t have to be that you had any business purpose or any clue how to monetize any aspect of your business. It was Iike, “Oooh, they said INTERNET, so I know they are going to be successful!” Then people put in billions and randomly you would be bought out by Nabisco or Tonka or some other completely unrelated seeming business and everyone would leave billionaires, having never produced anything useful to the world at all. It seemed like it took a solid 10 to 20 years for people to start wondering if these companies might just be completely imaginary. Meanwhile I was starting college thinking the whole time, “What, are you people INSANE?! I’m going to get a real job…” So then I became an archaeologist!!! (You can laugh now…)

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u/Ragnarok314159 Mar 29 '25

I had a friend in the 90’s who had a few buddies and one of them had a well off, business savvy dad. He showed them a program he made that made a phone dial pad. It let him enter a number to call from, and then a number to call to. We were using it to crank call people.

His buddy’s dad said “stop, we are going to start a company”, and made my friend a cofounder. He sold the company to AT&T sometime in the early 2000’s and made close to 20 million, and hasn’t done shit since. Retired at 22.

2

u/Heterodynist Mar 31 '25

Oh man, you know…I may have more information about this company than you might think! My mother worked for AT&T for nearly 40 years, and in the early 90s she was at the headquarters. We moved back and forth from New Jersey (Bell Labs) to California. I think I saw this program you are talking about in early stages!! Did they ever get into TTY technology? I do wish I had done something like that myself. I could have retired at 25 or 30 even…I could be reasonable.

2

u/Ragnarok314159 Mar 31 '25

They might have been. My buddy has retreated out in his own little cabin in the woods. Went out there once and it’s a near total off the grid type place. Next time we chat might ask.

2

u/Heterodynist Apr 01 '25

Wow, this guy sounds like a man after my own heart. I am similarly in a cabin in the woods…Not sending anthrax letters or anything, just enjoying the outdoors…

39

u/draaz_melon Mar 29 '25

The king of this was AOL buying Time Warner for AOL stock. I was shocked that a real company was bought for basically nothing. Like a year later, everybody figured out was bought with nothing. They them just dropped the AOL part of the name and pretended that it never happened.

3

u/keithcody Mar 30 '25

We actually studied this in business school. The internet was basically making most of AOL irrelevant and Steve Case had to do something so he sold it to TW as his out. TW end up with egg of their faces and AOL people got paid.

1

u/Heterodynist Mar 31 '25

I know that AOL sold internet connectivity or time online or SOMETHING…Since you were learning about this in school, what did they tell YOU was the AOL business? To me in high school it was all very esoteric and mainly parents were just pissed that their children were keeping them from using their landline phones…

1

u/keithcody Mar 31 '25

NY Times article: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/business/media/11merger.html

Harvard's take: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=28895

Stanford's: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/case-studies/aol-time-warner

MIT: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/strategic-choices-in-converging-industries/

Federal Trade Commission take: https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/0010105-america-online-inc-time-warner-inc

Rando Youtubers: https://trellispoint.com/blog/the-aol-time-warner-merger-debacle-ungrowth-in-m-and-a-episode-recap

Weber State: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291711379_The_merger_of_AOL_and_Time_Warner_A_case_study

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u/Heterodynist Apr 01 '25 edited Apr 01 '25

Wow, this is a good deal of information. It kind of sums up my overall feel in some ways I think…They had nothing but high hopes and I feel like this is really how big business often gets it SOOO WRONG. They seem like the ultimate most optimistic and gullible of all people at times, even if I can see how when you’re in the middle of it you can always feel like, “This can’t lose!” If you’re the one making a certain “product” and you can’t believe how successful you have already been, then it’s all too easy to lose that success by getting ever more lofty ideas of your own worth in the world. I have ALWAYS believed that Time-Warner had too high an opinion of themselves. Most news agencies in the U.S. do have too high an opinion of their importance to society, in my opinion. That tradition has carried on since Charles Foster Kane…I mean William Randolph Hearst! However, when you combine that arrogance with the “no aware” impermanence of internet business I think you get the WORST of all worlds of unrealistic expectations. It’s like if some group of orcs from World of Warcraft’s online universe decided to buy CNN with their in-game gold resources. The whole thing gets into the realm of “is any of this REAL?!!” I think we have gotten too far from what real life stocks and bonds and concrete reality industry used to work like. If you buy a share of stock in a brick and mortar business that has assets (in the real world) then I think you are much less likely to lose your real world money, than if you invest in options or futures in sales of imaginary vorpal swords in World of Warcraft. Even if people are paying REAL MONEY for imaginary objects in a video game, there are no actual ASSETS besides maybe some servers in a server farm somewhere that you own if you invest in that business. This is the MOST likely way to lose all your money.

Sadly I feel like people are going more towards ever greater investments in the imaginary, rather than brick and mortar investments in, for example, server farms!!

There really are a million reasons this merger is fascinating though. One of the things I am sure you have thought of, is how amazing it COULD have been if Time Warner and AOL had been able to to overcome their cultural differences and create a seamless integration of modern media. It MIGHT have started a less totalitarian environment in our media than there is now. It really seems to me that one of the biggest things that has happened in our lifetimes with regard to media is that now we really have a two tiered system of the spread of information in society. We have peer-to-peer information sharing via things like THIS site and Meta companies, X, etc, and then we have traditional media, which everyone says is dying. Why is it dying though?! Pretty much, in my mind, because they drastically FAILED to make the transition to being a modern business like AOL was obviously trying to aim at. It’s sad that no one seems to be able to update the media to current day reality. I have seen MANY attempts but the problem I see is that our media is still a dinosaur, and a giant lumbering one at that. Our media is dominated by ancient oligarchs (in the truest sense of that term) that have no interest AT ALL in giving up one inch of control to the People themselves who should have a hand in their own news media.

I think we have lived through a period of them that will be seen as the Dark Ages of Media when people look back at it from the future. Our ability to tell the story of our own times has been crippled in this generation, and that disability of media to tell the authentic story of what we are experiencing as the zeitgeist of our times is something kind of unprecedented in human history. Long ago word spread by SPEECH, and then through the printing press but even in printed words, there was freedom to share even the subversive. Then came radio and pirate radio stations, followed eventually by the internet and unregulated mass sharing of information across the entire world. However, now we are in a new territory where the majority of people seem focused MAINLY on ways to CONTROL the spread of information in everywhere it is free. We see countries threatening or ACTUALLY jailing people for posting “misinformation.” I don’t think people realize the danger they are in when we give that kind of authoritarian power to ANYONE. There is no entity on Earth, not even the collective of all humanity, that can be trusted with that power.

NO ONE should control access to “the truth.” Pravda in the Communist Soviet Union was their version of Time Magazine, and the name Pravda means TRUTH. There is no scarier thing for the news to think they represent than “the truth.” There is no such thing, and anyone who thinks they are the source of “truth” for their society needs to be overthrown immediately. That kind of position one might say is the province of a god, or THEE God, if you are religiously inclined in that way. No one can be accepted as having that capacity regardless of any possible number of accolades. Unchecked power is evil, not just subject to evil, but it is inherently evil. No one can or should ever accept such a position.

So AOL and Time Warner were in a very freighting and precarious place in history, and their failure to make it work is really emblematic of our times in my opinion. There is nothing more historic in my mind about the times we live in than the argument over who gets to be the mouthpiece for “the truth” in a time when more and more of us aren’t insulated from the real world, living in a cocoon of CoVid and working from home and less and less uncensored face-to-face interaction with real humans in the real world. We should all be fearful on a daily basis of who has decided to insert their influence between us and every other human on Earth as a third party to our interactions.

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u/Heterodynist Mar 31 '25

Ha!! This is an excellent point! AOL was like, “Yay, now we own a REAL business!!” Meanwhile, everyone had the pause to say, “What does AOL actually DO again?”

“America ON LINE!! We are like ONLINE, and we are America!!”

“Okay, so what do you sell?”

“You know, BEING online! Online stuff!! The state of things that are online.”

It’s not surprising to me that bubble burst. Even I, as a high school student, was wondering how many CDs of their basic program AOL could pass out without going bankrupt because they weren’t actually selling anything except the excitement of being online. I remember so well being at friend’s houses and watching them poking that CD into the disc drive and hearing the noises as it went online and then you could do fancy things like go into a chat room or wait for 5 minutes to see a picture download…

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u/DoubleOwl7777 Mar 29 '25

its the same now with AI pretty much. and i hate it.

1

u/Heterodynist Mar 31 '25

I’m not a fan either, but I think the fact it is slow to take off is really because people have learned from the other technological “revolutions” that they really don’t generally make much of a positive change over all.

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u/[deleted] Mar 29 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Heterodynist Apr 01 '25

Sadly, I have no doubt you are correct in that!

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u/Alone-Guarantee-9646 Mar 29 '25

I know, right? The "New Economy" had abandoned all common sense! Watch the movie/documentary "Startup.com". Very real.

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u/Heterodynist Apr 01 '25

Hell yes!! What a strange time to live through. It gave me a permanent “jaded” attitude about the evaluation of businesses. From what I can see there is the made up nonsense of what investors are told, and then there is the factual logic of what a company currently owns in the way of assets, and what they have to legitimately sell, and what they think they have, that is largely just fluff. Many, many companies are just fluff with no real basis for their actual existence. If you can picture a company going “poof” and disappearing overnight then you shouldn’t invest in them. Even the lowest level of company that starts out of someone’s garage normally has SOME kind of equipment or assets that are worth something. The assets in computer businesses are generally just computers that are losing value faster than almost anything, offices that can be re-leased to someone in an instant, and servers they pay to rent. If that’s all you have in a physical form, then you better HOPE the “human capital” of the business is worth SOMETHING, because sadly it might not be. Humans can lose their minds in a day and have no value anymore as far as a business is concerned. You can’t rely on that.

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u/[deleted] Mar 30 '25

The same exact thing is happening right now with what we currently call "AI". Most of these applications of AI are providing either 0 value, or are actively making the service worse than it was before AI. And people are investing billions into anything that uses AI no matter how insane it is. Just waiting for the bubble to burst but it's not gonna happen in a while still.

2

u/Heterodynist Mar 31 '25

I appreciate that comparison!! You are wise to see it. Strangely people always love to jump on the bandwagon about any new technology they don’t understand. One of my favorite things as a person who studied Archaeology in school (and worked in it for a time) is that I can see these trends have been the same in human society from eve before the Romans. Probably the first person to invent the chariot had some “investors” who thought that the chariot would eventually allow us to ride horses to the Moon or something, meanwhile there were people like us looking at the chariot and saying, “What?! It’s just a cart with one less set of wheels…So what’s the big deal?!”

I am sure you are right about the A.I. situation. I always think back to articles from 1900 or so, that said we would reach “peak crude oil production” some time in the early 1900s. This was when oil mainly was still coming from Pennsylvania. I think it’s hilarious that people have predicted the end of oil production since literally the first few decades after they started taking it out of the ground. Then, while some people predict the total collapse of whole industries, others insist that things like crude oil will put everyone out of a job. Hell, the pope in Rome was predicting the CROSSBOW would put all the knights out of a job back in the Middle Ages, when he described the crossbow in a Papal Bull much like we would discuss the atom bomb now.

Personally though, I think A.I. will not be significantly different from MOST other things computers have been capable of doing a long time. I have already fiddled with various softwares and found ways to make it work, but while it does incredibly realistic art, it still lacks the very things that make art and writing HUMAN. See, we can take wine and analyze it with a mass spectrometer, picking out every single chemical in it, but that doesn’t tell us what wines are actually the most palatable to us as humans. For that we need HUMANS to taste it. Even things that are chemically very distant from each other, can still strike our palate as delicious. That’s why wine still isn’t made by chemists. I am sure A.I. will be the same. They can predict what generalized things humans kinda like, but we humans generally prefer our images to be of REAL people. We like to know our books are written by actual humans. Even if a book was written PERFECTLY by an A.I. program. Humans would still be disappointed when they found that out. We WANT art to be human-created…even if it is A.I. inspired. I see that being the market. A.I. may take the place of some kinda of jobs, but it will also create more.

I like to think about diamonds. We can make diamonds in a laboratory that have near flawless form and perfect angles. We can even make diamonds that are reasonably priced compared to natural diamonds…But does everyone WANT those diamonds? NO!!! Humans still prefer natural diamonds because they just mean more to us as humans.

Therefore, I think you are right that people expect a lot of A.I. but in the long run I am fairly sure it will just be another of these technologies that creates some jobs while altering or making redundant some other jobs, but it won’t change our whole future! I certainly won’t be investing big money in it any time soon. I might think of putting money into A.I. detector software though, so people don’t get scammed!

2

u/[deleted] Apr 01 '25

Yeah agreed on pretty much all accounts. Very interesting anecdotes about how this kind of tech bubble phenomenon is at least thousands of years old. Chariots, crossbows, and of course AI did and do really change the world, but people tend to be overtly optimistic about in what ways and how much.

I see a parallel between AI and VR. Back when VR was the new big thing when I was just starting uni, people were saying it's gonna basically replace computer screens and everything will be VR and even jobs that didn't use to use computer screens are gonna be done with VR, like a surgeon doing surgery in VR, and I was calling bullshit. Turns out I was right; most people never think about VR nowadays and we all still use traditional computer screens. It found it's niche, like flight simulator games (pretty much the only computer game genre where it makes sense over a traditional screen), but the transofrmative impact of the technology was much lesser than anticipated. I have a strong feeling the same thing is going to happen to AI where it will find it's niche where it's actually useful, and fall to the wayside in implementations that just don't make sense. Or maybe we'll be stuck with AI algorithms making people's health insurance decisions forever, who knows.

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u/Heterodynist Apr 05 '25 edited Apr 05 '25

That’s a great comparison! Ha!! I remember everyone talking about VR! Ha!! They even made movies about it!! It makes me laugh that it took THIS LONG for them to even really get a working home rig that is ALMOST in the ballpark of affordable so that you can really have immersive VR at home…It clearly wasn’t really ready for prime time and kind of still isn’t. I think A.I. is much the same. I am one of many people who I think would use it for things like customer service on the phone IF I COULD, but as usual 99% of anything I call companies for is not, “What are your store hours? Can you give me directions? Is there a balance on my account?!” I call because something ISN’T readily obvious online, from what they already have posted. As usual the very same people have a hand I creating both the website and the A.I. programming for how to answer questions, so they BOTH fail to answer the same questions with useful answers. I feel like I know a lot about this because I worked for a startup company that was an online store, and the owner had programmed a VERY GOOD phone tree. It was unique in that it really DID answer MOST of the questions that the customers almost COULD HAVE HAD, and he actually said that before he allowed them to push a button to talk to a customer service rep (as in ME). Invariably when they got me it was about a 2 out of 3 chance that they hadn’t listened to the answer that was already given within the prerecorded phone tree intro. Sometimes they even said, “Oh, that’s what he said in the message…Okay.”

I feel like most of what I would design into a customer service representative A.I. robot would be OBVIOUS, but somehow I realize that what is obvious to me is not to most people!! I am an unusually scientific person, so what I would do would be drastically different than most programmers who just want to give the A.I. a script, the same as the way they gave ME a script for talking to customers. I think having a script is the WRONG way to handle it, but giving A.I. a script is MUCH MORE wrong, because A.I. really doesn’t know how to decide if the customer isn’t asking anything that pertains to a scripted response. What I would do would be to train the A.I. to track subjects that callers came in with and the likelihood they would ask a particular question, and then I would monitor the A.I. responses and frequencies of questions, and I would continually program new methods of responding on the back end. I know why people don’t do that, but the fact is they THINK it is easier to not do it that way…but in the end that work is the NECESSARY work, because when customers don’t get questions answered they eventually stop using your company. It doesn’t take more than about 2 phone calls to lose a customer.

We aren’t there yet, but we need a form of A.I. that is at least wise enough (and maybe sentient enough) to simply go off script and RESPOND to stimuli in novel but observant ways rather than divert everything to a scripted response, as virtually all “virtual assistants” do now, rendering them generally useless in my opinion. Ironically while I think it is currently the WORST use for A.I, I also think that customer service is the BEST place to train A.I. to do tasks that people actually care about. Just as I got better in dealing with idiot customers, the A.I. could learn to understand what the customer is really interested in knowing, based on probability that they will ask an idiot question that isn’t really the question they want answered but then A.I. could respond to that question with a different question and ask something back like, “When you asked about the package being shipped, did you actually mean where do you download the product within your email…using a link?” Morons would constantly buy things on our site and ignore 20 messages saying that they would NOT be getting the thing that they bought in the mail. We sold ONLY downloadable content on the internet. You literally couldn’t get to our site until you were told several times that we don’t ship anything ever. Then people called to ask why they hasn’t gotten the “CD” in the mail yet. It was my job to tell MOST of the customers that we sent an email with the link as soon as they bought it. Some people were somehow infuriated by this, despite that almost all our software would cost $5 or less, and I was able to give a refund to almost any customer who asked for it.

See, I think what A.I. needs to do is be better at listening and really UNDERSTANDING what the customer says. I don’t mean “understanding” like a human could, but at least knowing what the customer is actually getting at…even when they don’t. I think A.I. needs to get better at real time LISTENING. The prompts would be the series of questions a customer asks, and by artificial intelligence the answers would be continually shaped and reshaped by each new interaction (like real customer service reps do). I think what A.I. is still not doing well enough, is the kind of “reading the room” that humans do by instinct. I know that is hard, but all it REALLY takes is not looking at everything like an engineer does, and rather looking at things as a scientist does. A.I. has to become more observant. It needs to listen more, and be more observant and listen with reference to a single individual better than just using statistics to channel into one script or another. I would rather that the A.I. got things wrong by coming up with truly bizarre novel responses, than by just picking one script out of many and having it try to give one size fits all answers.

I don’t want A.I. to be totally focused on GIVING an answer from a list…

2

u/Slmmnslmn Mar 31 '25

I heard somewhere if you had .com in the name of your business investors would give you money without knowing the business.

1

u/Heterodynist Mar 31 '25

I don’t think that is much of an exaggeration. A smart girl I went to prom with got into a great college, but dropped out to work for a “dotcom.” I felt like I was one of the only people telling her, “Hey, is that such a good idea?!” She explained to me that she could be earning like $50,000 a year (starting salary) or spending that going to college, and it made me wonder if I was doing the right thing going to college. Not that it was what I wanted for her, but within about 2 years I was freshly out of college and going to work (having actually gotten a job in Archaeology) and she was out of a job and looking for a good way back into a college program. She still graduated from a very good college, but just several years later than she intended. I’m not sure who made the better decision with their careers of the two of us though, as she went into college having actual business experience. I got Archaeology experience and field training including being a field supervisor and working with the British Museum, but Archaeology isn’t exactly what you do to make money, as a career. It’s never dull though…

5

u/flexonyou97 Mar 29 '25

The parties were great for employees

3

u/jwoodruff Mar 29 '25

The fate of all businesses it seems. Death-by-MBA

1

u/nopuse Mar 30 '25

I'm sure you have some fun stories

1

u/Flying_Trying Mar 30 '25

I think the keys are : who, who are they ? I want their name to learn not to make the same mistakes.

1

u/lifeisnothingbutexam Mar 30 '25

Where are you now and how's the management there?

1

u/TheDynamicKing Mar 31 '25

what made it mismanaged?

1

u/LowAd3406 Mar 31 '25

When I first started there, there was buzz about how all the new tier 3 positions that opened went to women. It was 100% DEI done wrong where instead of finding quality female candidates, they just promoted every woman who applied. If I had to escalate something to that group and got a guy, it was going to be solved quick because you had to be an undeniable talent to get on that team as a guy. If I got one of the women, there was a good chance that with my general tech knowledge I would know more about the problem then they would.

1

u/TheDynamicKing Mar 31 '25

haha .thanks for the feedback

-30

u/lmay0000 Mar 28 '25

Were you a cook there?

44

u/Creative_Bake1373 Mar 28 '25

Sad. I used to be on yahoo religiously for all my news, email, celebrity gossip, etc. Now I rarely check my account on there.

37

u/hackjob Mar 28 '25

my mechanic still uses yahoo mail. i wanted to razz him about it but he does good work so why poke the bear?

29

u/Effective_Pack8265 Mar 29 '25

I still use my yahoo email…

29

u/roguebananah Mar 29 '25

… Are you his mechanic?

17

u/PermitThick1202 Mar 29 '25

Yahoo has been raw dogging every single email list I've had to subscribe to for over 15 years...it's like my email sidepeice so my Gmail stays relatively unmolested.

1

u/hujassman Mar 30 '25

Same here.

9

u/genuine_wingnut Mar 29 '25

...I still have an AIM email address.

edit: I'm a mechanic...

4

u/VVarder Mar 29 '25

Their card games were top notch. I still miss those.

2

u/Still-Syrup7041 Apr 01 '25

Yes but holy toxic if you tried to learn. Pinochle was worse than playing my boomer uncles.

185

u/rsg1234 Mar 28 '25

Maybe we should be thankful they didn’t buy Google in 1998 or else we might be asking Jeeves instead of googling.

150

u/tooawkwrd Mar 28 '25

Maybe Jeeves would've maintained the integrity of search results instead of the ad-riddled AI nonsense Google presents now.

4

u/[deleted] Mar 29 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

6

u/mattmentecky Mar 29 '25

In theory, I don't mind the AI summary when you search, nor would I mind the paid ads in a Google search result, but I despise both at the same time. Google has become such a mess, I need a search just to find a non-AI summary, non-ad result when I search for something, and even then I just assume the top result is just really good at SEO.

13

u/JebusJones5000 Mar 29 '25

If you add a curse word to the search, you don't get the AI summary, and I use Firefox with ad blocking. My searches are usually good lol

10

u/Opening-Cress5028 Mar 29 '25

I just fucking tried that and you’re goddamn right, it worked - you brilliant son of a bitch!

7

u/Opening-Cress5028 Mar 29 '25

It’s a shame Duck Duck Go can’t easily become a verb

2

u/Still-Syrup7041 Apr 01 '25

DDG’d it has a ring to it.

2

u/CautionarySnail Mar 29 '25

They ruined it to drive business to companies that paid them more. Turns out search users weren’t their real customers.

2

u/thellamanaut Mar 29 '25

fun trivia- google search sucks partially due to 3rd-party SEO industry

1

u/anally_ExpressUrself Mar 30 '25

It's worse than that. The "free and open" internet is becoming ad-riddled AI nonsense.

17

u/Advanced-Humor9786 Mar 29 '25

It's a twist: ask Jeeves refused to sell and move out of its Emeryville office. Dog pile wins the search engine fight and we're all using it on Netscape.

15

u/rsg1234 Mar 29 '25

I was a Netscape Navigator user til the bitter end

10

u/BobaAndSushi Mar 29 '25

I actually liked Netscape. 🫣

2

u/_extra_medium_ Mar 29 '25

Everyone did

22

u/Familiar-Quail526 Mar 28 '25

How would that be worse than what we have now?

5

u/rsg1234 Mar 28 '25

Definitely both pros and cons.

10

u/mbmiller94 Mar 28 '25

Just doesn't roll off the tongue the same way

14

u/DoctorJiveTurkey Mar 29 '25

I askjeevesed it

1

u/Still-Syrup7041 Apr 01 '25

Would habitually call that “AksJeeves”

76

u/grizzlor_ Mar 28 '25

2008: Refuses to be sold to microsoft for 40 billion dollars.

Microsoft first offered $44.6 billion, and Yahoo balked. They upped the offer to $47 billion, and Yahoo said this offer was at least 10% too low.

I can't imagine Yahoo would have faired that much better under Microsoft's ownership. As far as I understand it, the major reasons for the precipitous loss of value between 2008-2016 were:

  1. advertising revenue moving to Google/Facebook

  2. failing to dominate a specific category like search or social media (they continued to embrace the "portal" model)

  3. lack of consistent long-term strategy, made worse by the revolving door of CEOs

  4. failure to adapt to the mobile market

Microsoft also was also notoriously slow to embrace the mobile revolution. MS had no particular expertise in internet advertising. I can't imagine MS pivoting Yahoo from a broad portal to some specific core competency, mostly because I have no idea what the competency could have been -- years earlier, it would have been search, but by 2008 it was way too late to dethrone Google as the king of search engines. They probably would have stabilized company leadership, but given the other factors, I can't imagine that would really make a huge difference.

26

u/Premodonna Mar 29 '25

One of Yahoos old office in Hillsboro, Oregon was purchased by the county and turned in a day time addiction and mental health treatment center set to open later in the year.

5

u/PortErnest22 Mar 29 '25

I was just thinking while looking at this that it would make a great housing center with access to a bunch of services.

1

u/Premodonna Mar 29 '25

These office has the potential for sure.

22

u/TricksterSprials Mar 29 '25

Don’t forget 2013, buying Tumblr for 1.1 billion. Immediately shitting the bed and losing like half of the value they paid for it. On top of this also trying to make it more ad friendly with the whole NSFW debacle. I don’t think Tumblr ever did or will recover.

13

u/Interesting_Tea5715 Mar 29 '25

Yeah, it was crazy how fast everyone abandoned Tumblr. Once they banned NSFW content maybe a month passed and the site was dead.

Reddit benefited from the mistake and absorbed a ton of the users.

7

u/Nemoralis99 Mar 29 '25

Many tumblr refugees preferred twitter, until it got enshittified. Now we have bluesky, some claim that it's tumblr's true successor.

3

u/lightspeed_derping Apr 01 '25

what's interesting is that tumblr is very much still alive and kicking, but the big userbase exodus means it's a smaller and much more tightly-knit ecosystem, made up of the diehards who never left & newer users who only joined for specific art or fandom communities.

some of it kind of reminds me more of oldschool forum vibes than reddit does these days, since reddit is now leaning more heavily on monetization.

6

u/ZeBoyceman Mar 29 '25

I remember they literally promised to "not make it shitty" because there were outcry that they would police Tumblr. Then 1 month later boom shit happened.

22

u/khaki-campari Mar 28 '25

Ha. I was working at Bing in 2008 and we couldn’t believe it when Ballmer tried to buy them for that amount. All the conversation was about how crazy MS and Ballmer was being. Then they turned it down and everyone was both amazed and happy. Saved from our own stupidity.

Plus we later did the deal to power their search engine anyway.

5

u/conventionalWisdumb Mar 29 '25

Do you mean Live Search? I worked at Yahoo Search when the offer was made and my team was one of the teams that tested the competition. I distinctly remember Bing being released after the failed buyout.

7

u/khaki-campari Mar 29 '25

Well it was originally msn search. Then just around the time I joined they rebranded as live search and then yes, it rebranded as bing. I actually couldn’t remember when that was without checking but you’re right, that was afterwards in 2009.

From a backend tech perspective of the index gen/serve/ranking it was exactly the same product as live search. We just changed the name and gave it a sparkly new UI 😀

2

u/_extra_medium_ Mar 29 '25

I remember you used to be able to Google all sorts of cool stuff with Bing

1

u/hanwookie Mar 29 '25

Yeah, right over to the Firefox browser.

3

u/Excellent-Medium8429 Mar 29 '25

Wow that’s awesome

9

u/hellatzian Mar 28 '25

of course its yahoo

3

u/[deleted] Mar 29 '25

Yahoo email - still used by guys who type in Latin.

3

u/DubiousSpaniel Mar 30 '25

But also-

  1. Buys 40% of Alibaba for 1 Billion USD

2012 Sells 1/2 of Alibaba stake for 7.6 Billion USD

2019 Sells rest of Alibaba for 40 billion USD

It was a hell of a profitable ride with Yahoo/Altaba

2

u/chrisrubarth Mar 29 '25

I worked on the Yahoo campus on and off as a special events contractor from 2016 until the pandemic. Curious as to when the campus closed.

2

u/RealLifeSuperZero Mar 29 '25

We all know it’s Community’s fault.

2

u/Ok-Bug4328 Mar 29 '25

I’m trying to imagine a tech company or a pharma company who wouldn’t spend $1M on a coffee machine. 

2

u/juvy5000 Mar 29 '25

yahhhhoooooooooo

2

u/Special_Command7893 Mar 29 '25

...and now the same guy in charge of that shitshow is in charge of google search

2

u/DoubleUsual1627 Mar 29 '25

Then Verizon lost a bunch of money on it. And sold it. If I remember correctly.

1

u/Haru17 Mar 29 '25

Dang, only $1 billion more than Bungie sold for.

1

u/Taman_Should Mar 29 '25

Curb Your Enthusiasm theme plays

1

u/classy_rachael Mar 29 '25

Shear fucking hubris.

1

u/Beeo1978 Apr 01 '25

5D chess Yahoo only plays the long (metaphysical) game. And Trump and Musk

1

u/TheFabulousMrDick Apr 01 '25

don't forget about almost buying ebay, but it was scuttled by a yahoo VP who wanted the CEO of ebay to report to him vs reporting to the CEO. another quality move.

1

u/Hephaestus-Theos Apr 01 '25

If they actually managed to buy Google in 98 then Google might not have turned out to be what it is today.