the blog

It's not how it seems .... an answer?

Date

1/27/2008 05:18:00 PM [permalink]

Author

yahooza

Entry

"Good thing you had the foresight to leave" — I get a lot of that.

That's what many Y! outsiders have told me after the Y! Answers drama weeks ago. Let me set the record straight: there is a LOT of context that people on the outside cannot realize. There are reasons to the meltdown, which I cannot disclose, because I left the group and don't have concrete details. Indirectly, if I had been an EVP, I would have done the same thing and moved operations elsewhere. Maybe.

For me, the unhappenings of Answers began with the incessant need to burn out the engineers, the cogs of the wheel, to achieve pointless features. Last year, the product strategy wanted to introduce social-networking features such as groups and tagging which do nothing, and should have focused on developing ways to surface the most awesome knowledge. Methinks that execs and the rest of the hierarchy desired visual changes (re-skinning, pop-out blingy things and buzzword features) rather than to understand and build on the fundamentals of the product—and ultimately, to monetize 'em.

If you ask me, it's sad that the most successful home-grown Y! product went the way that it did, because of politics, power struggles, etc.

So, in conclusion, I didn't leave "just in time" or "I did so before shit hit the fan" .... there's more to it ....

Labels: yanswers

Comments

0 +add yours