Will Yahoo's Fire Eagle burn out at ETech?

1.64K

Owen Thomas

03/05/08 01:41AM

Filed to: rumormonger

This image was lost some time after publication.

Facing a takeover bid from Microsoft, Yahoo has pinned its hopes on new product launches from its best and brightest. In less than 11 hours, one of them, developer Tom Coates, will take the stage at ETech, Tim O'Reilly's conference outside San Diego. His mission: to roll out the long-delayed Fire Eagle, a system for announcing your physical location to other websites. Possibly. This evening, Coates has been announcing his location, and his situation, via Twitter. He's in Carlsbad, the site of the conference. Things are not going well: "Listening to Chopin. It is not calming me the fuck down. Grr!" In other Twitters, Coates moans about the number of tasks left to do. While he doesn't specify, it's hard to imagine he's doing anything but fixing bugs

Much rides on Coates's tail. His previous boss, Salim Ismail, was fired, in part due to Fire Eagle's delays. His new boss, Chad Dickerson, has flown down from San Francisco to watch the launch.

The Microsoft takeover comes down to this: Bill Gates & Co. think they can outcode Jerry Yang's minions. Can they? Or does Yahoo actually know what it's doing? Coates's presentation tomorrow will form part of the answer.

The following replies are approved. To see additional replies that are pending approval, click Show Pending. Warning: These may contain graphic material.

raincoaster Owen Thomas 03/05/08 09:14AM

Sounds like he's gonna have to hit the hard stuff. I'm talking Yanni. I'm talking Enya.

Vulture Owen Thomas 03/05/08 02:17AM

I intend no disrespect for the Fire Eagle guys, real-time location becomes a theoretically hard problem the moment you attempt to do something non-trivial with it, but everything I have heard officially and unofficially about the product does not instill confidence that it will amount to anything significant. Too many limitations and too many weaknesses.

But like I said, it only sounds easy to someone who does not understand the nature of the problem, so I give them a pass based on the fact it is a difficult thing to deliver no matter how badly Yahoo wants it. A couple big, respected companies have already tried to implement similar concepts internally and failed, except unlike Yahoo they were smart enough to not ship a public product with what are probably terminal defects.

It will be interesting to see what they deliver, but I am not sanguine.

renaissancechambara Owen Thomas 03/05/08 04:07AM

Tom gets a bit stressed before events, I am sure that it will rock. I used to hear those kind of things when he was doing a document in Keynote.

Oh, and he can be grumpy on occasion. Non-story here move on Owen :)

plasticbagUK Owen Thomas 03/05/08 02:25PM

Nice to get the press attention obviously, but really, I just got a bit overwhelmed writing my talk, blog posts and managing the launch stuff! :D