Bad management can kill any community, but Yahoo is especially good at the killing

Bad management always leads to a tragic waste of resources, but the way Yahoo kills off one great site after another is really awful to watch. I’m very sad to watch them slaughter Flickr:

It had nothing to do with the fact that Google Photos is rolling out new innovation on a weekly basis while Flickr is still stuck in 2004. I realized it when I went to Trey Ratcliff’s photowalk at Stanford. There were over 200 people there. *200 people*! It was the largest photowalk I’ve ever been on and I’ve done dozens over the years. And what was everybody talking about at the photowalk?

Flickr?

No.

Google+?

Yes.

Not only was *everyone* talking about Google, there were tons of people from Google who were there at the walk.

Google Photos Community Manager Brian Rose was there (along with his sexy moustache). The Photo Team guy who built their lightbox Vincent Mo was there. Google+ Community Manager Natalie Villalobos was there (she used to work at Yahoo). Chris Chabot was there (and he was at last night’s photowalk in SF too). Mike Wiacek was there.

And these are just some of the people at Google that I know better than others.

There were so many more Googlers there as well. Lisa Bettany and Catherine Hall from TWIT Photos were there too.

I remember back when Flickr used to feel like this. Back when Stewart Butterfield used to show up at the SF Flickr Social meetups. Even though those were smaller meetups, they were full of the same high energy and spirit. Now the SF Flickr Group is basically dead. The meetups that used to happen every month don’t happen anymore. There are only three posts to the group in the past year and one of them is about reviving the group. I haven’t seen a Flickr employee in years. I’m still banned from their help forum for two years now — thanks alot guys.

Some of this is just normal marketing for a company that is launching a new site — of course the folks from Google are there. The big question is whether they will still be there a year from now.

But that is a side issue. The main issue is the way Yahoo refuses to invest in any of its products. Even when it has something that once lead the pack, it allows it to slide.

On a side note, watching Yahoo’s decline I’ve come to doubt Steve Blank’s definition of an established business:

How do you know your business model is the right one? When revenue, users, traffic, etc., start increasing in a repeatable way you predicted and make your investors happy.

I worry about the word “repeatable”. How long is it repeatable? At least in the world of software, everything needs to be constantly updated and changed. You might have a model that is repeatable for 6 months or a year, but not much beyond that. I can imagine the managers at Yahoo thinking to themselves “We don’t need to pivot Flickr any more because we are now an established firm, and our job is to work with our repeatable model.” Such thinking can be used to justify a lack of creative thinking for any project. And a lack of creative thinking can kill any project.

Of course, Flickr will remain on the web for a very long time. Even Photo.net is still on the web, and it was one of the very first web sites. But Flickr is drifting and will not be as important as it used to be.