Yahoo's great new weather app
It combines weather data with user-uploaded photos from Flickr. Marissa Meyer gets it.
What’s remarkable about this is that someone in Yahoo had a good idea like this, and they were given the resources to build it and ship it. This sounds simple, not something that should be worthy of note–it should just be the way all companies work–but they don’t. If you’ve ever worked at a company anywhere near the size of Yahoo, then you know about the politics and bureaucracy that come with the experience, and the stifling effect that can have.
Indeed, before Meyer became CEO, when was the last time we saw anything like this out of Yahoo? But since she arrived, we’ve had the great Flickr app update, and now this. My only wish would be: More like this, faster. But I can see why they can’t rush, or the high level of quality that Yahoo is slowly-but-surely building could quickly unravel, from the clamour of too many dissenting voices. I suspect Meyer is keeping the teams small and focused, for good reason.
This sort of thing makes me feel good, not just about Yahoo, but about the software business in general.