You, most of the HN crowd, and myself live in a world removed from the real world. I work for a company which sells fancy business cards and print products to dentists who easily spend more than $1000 on one order, and you know what? They usually have an earthlink.net, aol.com, or yahoo.com email address, and nothing in this world is going to make them change that. I tell some customers we can set them up with your own business email FOR FREE, and they simply politely refuse. Yahoo has the eyeballs of people who actually spend money, not people like myself who want free email and who are trained to never click on an ad.

I'm now part of a team working on a new product that just launched (not Google).

Every morning I go in and look at the dashboard, which shows the email addresses of the last 10 new signups. About 6-7 is gmail, 1 yahoo, 1 hotmail. There's usually 1 that's a custom email like from an unknown domain.

I don't have hard stats as I don't have access to the user db, but I've been playing this game for 1+ month every morning, and it's the same pattern all the time. This is for early adopters.

Also, from personal experience, most of my acquaintances, whether technical or not, are migrating from yahoo/hotmail to gmail. It's pretty common for me to have to remove somebody's old yahoo email address from my contacts because they finally got a gmail address.

Generally early adopters tend to be tech people though, which would explain the gmail addresses.

I know, that's why I wrote "This is for early adopters."

Sorry, I misread that you concluded that people must be moving away from hotmail/yahoo from this analysis.

It would interesting if Groupon gave us insights into which email clients their customers use?

I often see small businesses advertising "visit us at www.myexamplebusiness.com or email us at joesbiz23@hotmail.com". I've tried to explain that they can get a myexamplebusiness.com email address without changing current address, but they do not understand why it matters.

Agree hugely on the 'separate world'. Anecdotally, most people I know outside the USA (and quite a few non-tech friends in the states) use yahoo, hotmail, and live.com addresses as well. I think their worldwide marketshare is rather high.

I agree with you but I don't think your comment answers the question -- it answers the second part ("would anyone care if Yahoo disappeared?") but not the first part -- What is Yahoo / what's the Yahoo pitch?

The Yahoo pitch may not be important for people who use Yahoo mail, but it matters to investors, and most of all it matters to recruits. What should Mrs Meyer say to people to make them want to work for Yahoo?

Yahoo produces web software that it gives to customers for free and then sells ads against. They are profitable doing this.

They valley makes fun of them because the valley doesn't value profitable businesses, the valley values consumer craze for a product.

I'm not sure why Yahoo gets beat up so much either. They are profitable and get lambasted while Zynga and Groupon are tech darlings while their stock price plummets and they lose hundreds of millions of dollars. Yahoo gets insulted and asked to go away for suing Facebook, while Apple repeatedly attempts to prevent Samsung from being able to sell devices because of some very flimsy patent objections and people laud them as creative geniuses.

I don't think Zynga and Groupon are tech darlings ...

Maybe Zynga and Groupon were tech darlings?

Well the ZNGA IPO wasn't all that long ago. Just prior to that was the move to the huge amusement park-style office complex in downtown SF. I have friends who work there and are constantly posting pics of the awesome food and all-expense paid trips. These are things employees should get for performing well and making boatloads of cash. If you went purely by appearances, you'd assume ZNGA was one of the most wildly profitable companies on earth as opposed to one that is losing $1.30/share. I for one wouldn't invest a dime in the company when you see how irresponsibly they spend.

It seems to me like the valley values growth, something that yahoo hasn't had much of in recent years.

That's fair, but Yahoo has vast size which arguably is the point of growth.

They've had growth the last 2 quarters.

Your question is not as funny as it sounds. To quote http://money.cnn.com//2012/07/17/technology/yahoo-earnings-m... the market has pretty much dismissed any non-Asian *.yahoo.com properties: "Yahoo's Asian assets are worth $20.5 billion, according to Yahoo's latest financial report: $14 billion for its 40% ownership stake in Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba and $6.5 billion for the company's 35% share of Yahoo Japan. Yahoo's market capitalization currently sits at $19 billion. Ouch."

I am told by sports fans that Yahoo's sports content and fantasy sports leagues are quite good (I have no idea, please don't yell at me if you disagree.)

They also own flickr, which I'm sure you knew.

I am quite certain that people would care if these things, along with their @yahoo.com email addresses disappeared tomorrow. I'm sure you knew this too, because email is central to our online lives at this point.

So okay, you actually do know what yahoo does. What you don't know is their purpose. Google's purpose is to index all the worlds information (and then slap ads on it, but first one, then the other.) Apple's purpose is to make really great products, and then market them so well that people think they're even greater.

So, given what we know yahoo has, what's a consistent product story they could tell that would answer the question that comes up again and again?

Yahoo Fantasy Sports still has a leadership position in its space, which is a $1-2 Billion market for football alone. Anecdotally, it's the default fantasy sports platform for not only my group of friends, but whenever we are running an office pool (NCAA brackets, fantasy football, NFL survivor pool, etc.) since it's by far the fantasy sports platform with the widest adoption (main competitors being ESPN and CBS).

Yeah, yahoo fantasy has good market share, which pisses me off. ESPN has far superior ux.

That's an incredibly reductionist view, and I'm so tired of people parroting it over and over again as if it's insightful. I mean, maximize shareholder value how? And how do they continue to maximize shareholder value? And over what period are they maximizing shareholder value? And how do they try find global maxima instead of local maxima? Is your answer to this simply going to be to parrot "maximize shareholder value" again? Not all companies are started with the goal being "to maximize shareholder value." Try pitching that to VCs. Try trying to get a small business loan, telling your bank "ahh yes, I noticed that there are too-few companies maximizing shareholder value, so I'm going to do that."

"Maximize shareholder value" is not a company. A company needs vision, it needs to do something or build something. A company needs profit, and preferably lots of it, yes, but it also needs a guiding philosophy that informs the markets it enters and the ways it enters them. You can call it "marketing fluff", but it's what makes the company what it is. For the best companies, profit is part of the vision, but it does not subsume the vision.

Google and Apple are both very successful companies, but they're both very different. You can deride the difference between them as marketing fluff, but I call it "successfully executing on vision."

  That's an incredibly reductionist view

Now that is a pithy retort I must commit to memory! Ouch.

It's also simply not true at a company like Google where the strong-visioned founders are still in charge.

Maybe with 2nd or 3rd generation leaders Google et al will be maximizing shareholder value for the sake of maximizing shareholder value. But not yet. They're still doing what their founders want them to do.

Technically, Google is maximizing shareholder value, but their major shareholders value stuff beyond mere money. Not intending to detract from your point in any way, I just thought it's an interesting way to approach it.

Of course every company has a "vision statement" on the wall. That doesn't mean it's a real thing that's worth discussing on HN. Even if a tiny percentage of companies truly believe and adhere to it. Google+ certainly isn't anything about "organizing the world's information".

In what way are the social connections between people and the things they share with one another not information? In some sense, that's the most valuable information out there, which is why not having it scared the shit out of Google.

I really hate this sentiment. I think Ray Anderson, founder of Interface has it right: "For those who think business exists to make a profit, I suggest they think again. Business makes a profit to exist. Surely it must exist for some higher, nobler purpose than that."

Google seems to adhere to it as well. Google's founders (reluctantly) embraced text ads as a way to make the company they wanted to lead profitable so that it could continue to exist. I think modern business loses sight of this idea.

And many large ones. I once worked for somebody who previously had built a $400m company. His notion was that companies should have a purpose, be up to something interesting. "Profit is just permission to continue," was something he said more than once.

The mere pursuit of profit is always fatal in the long term because it's essentially a short-term outlook that leaves you rudderless.

Look at the car industry as an example. Toyota has been consistent in its pursuit of customer value, respect for staff, and waste reduction, with profit coming way down the list of priorities. GM, on the other hand, is where the modern increase-shareholder-value school of management originated. Toyota is now the world's largest car company, and GM would have died without a government bailout.

Yahoo! Finance is considered by many to be the best out there. It would be a net loss to have to switch to e.g. Google Finance.

I used to think Yahoo!'s days are over but it turns out it's hugely popular in Asia (Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan). Search engine wise it's behind Google but it's big when it comes to e-mail, news and all sorts of media content.

This is true, but organisational wise the Asian Yahoo! divisions are not wholly owned by Yahoo! as we know it. Yahoo! Japan for instance is a separately listed company part owned by Softbank. A friend of mine went for an interview at yahoo japan and was told "we don't have much to do with yahoo america so you'll never be sent to work there".

But you're right, it seems like an obvious strength to capitalize on.

I was going to say the same thing. I had a girlfriend from Taiwan studying in Australia who used Yahoo for most of the things she did online (email, search, shopping) and said most of her friends did too. This was in 2007 so things might have changed since then but even in 2007 most westerners thought Yahoo was dead and no one used it.

I have a girlfriend from Singapore and she is still using Yahoo extensively. Plus I discussed search engines with my Japanese teacher and few Asian students and most of them considered Yahoo the most popular website on the Internet.

Interesting, maybe they should have promoted the Asian division head to CEO...

search engine wise, it uses Bing.

tl;dr: there's value in an integrated product that works and is easy to use: just ask Apple.

An 'internet portal' is still very valuable to non-techie users: it provides them a reasonably structured way to access internet services and goods. My email? Here. Stock? There. News? All over the page. Photos? You got it. Chat? Games? Calendar? The weather? Search? As long as it's good enough, it's right there so, sure.

Of course, no future-looking company wants to compete in that market with their own similar product, so until that space gets completely 'disrupted' (what Google tried to with by ripping it to pieces) or 'reinvented' (social networks being the latest incumbent) or completely 'moved' (to a different access model like mobile), many people will continue existing solutions like Yahoo.

We recently released one of our Facebook games on Yahoo. The numbers were not groundbreaking or headline material, but it still surprised us that they were meaningful.

They are good with customers.

Customers of what, exactly? I've not heard of anyone using Yahoo, except those that are holding on to Yahoo email addresses because they don't know it makes them look old and technically illiterate.

I think he was referencing the Office Space comparison and Smykowski defending his job by saying he was good with customers.

I use quite a few of their services, some for legacy reasons. I use Flickr, admin a few mailing lists on Yahoo Groups, and am just in the process of convincing my muscle memory to move over from finance.yahoo.com to finance.google.com.

My guess is that Google Finance and other copycat sites (albeit better sites in some cases) that they have built are not good investments. If it isn't core to them I don't expect them to keep working on them.

He already told you, they are good with the goddamn customers. They have people skills, they are good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you?

It's surprising how much traffic they still get. Our year-old iOS game was just mentioned in a roundup of "top 10 difficult games" on a Yahoo! Games blog (and it wasn't even linked properly to the App Store), sending sales from 2 digits to 4 digits/day. We were floored that this happened due to a Yahoo post of all things...

Exactly my feelings. They were a search engine I never used, a mail account which only received spam, some mailing lists which were moved to better open-source solutions, and then a "media portal company" which seemed like it just regurgitated content from other sites.

I like some of the products which have come from Yahoo like their JavaScript libraries and YSlow toolkit. However, there are alternative (and in most cases better) options for those libraries so I don't really know what I need Yahoo to do for me.