Sounds like an opportunity for someone to buy yahoo messenger, make it work the way the oil industry wants it, and sell it to them as an industry specific chat service. No need to bring the rest of Yahoo along for the ride.
What it needs is probably a no-profit consortium dedicated to maintenance, with small fees. Industry members could then be peer-pressured into compliance. It would become a badge of honour, marketing expense etc etc.
you forgot they are running a multi trillion dollar industry on free-as-in-beer software.
I doubt they would pay $5 per user. or even a <your yearly salary> year flat fee.
and since they will not pay, you will have to run it on ads. And supporting online/mobile offerings (that do not have their requirement of local client/local logs) will always give you more money.
No need to make them pay or support it with ads. Keep offering it to them for free and make a killing front-running them on commodities trades. Or just trade regular stocks since the whole market seems to move based on the crude prices. Either way, it should be pretty easy for a hedge fund to make way more money from eavesdropping than it costs to run the service.
It would be a good way to teach an industry with plenty of money the virtue of paying for mission-critical services. Given that the industry runs on a service like Yahoo's, it's a pretty good bet that you could slip an innocuous looking change to the privacy policy past them.
I'm sure they can't wait to begin using a chat service that not only has no qualms reading their private communications, but actively undermines their business as well.
That's the whole point. They need to learn the point contracts, SLAs and all that goes along with paying for mission critical software. The fact that they haven't been taken advantage of as I suggested is only due to the benevolence of the provider. If Messenger was bought by an entity that was not so benevolent, they'd learn the value of paying for their mission critical tools very quickly. Because what they're doing now is irresponsible given how much money is involved.
I'd be willing to bet they'd pay for a seamless transition to a service that lets them keep their username, contact list, has the same UI, and basically works the same way as it did before.
Linux is free-as-in-speech software. That means I could clone it in a week and sell a competing product when, say Ubuntu, starts to implode. Free-as-in-beer software doesn't have that.
You're right it's not a dichotomy, but the property free-as-in-speech is the one that helps here, free-as-in-beer doesn't matter either way in this case (besides it's initial popularity).
There's a big difference between relying on a self-hosted product vs. a remote-hosted one. If your self-hosted software is suddenly no longer available, you have plenty of time to come up with a migration strategy, while you continue to use the obsolete product. If Yahoo Messenger went away, it would immediately disrupt business for all who rely on it.
Not to mention that any enterprise Linux user worth their salt has an expensive support contract with a major vendor (such as Red Hat). Either that, or they're confident that they have the in-house resources to support it. No enterprise user considers Linux to be "free as in beer", by any stretch of the imagination; rather, they're using it because it's the right tool for the job.
The Slack/GitHub model is to sell visibility to the company. X of your employees are using this, do you want to know how? Do you want an SLA? PCI compliance? $100k/yr.
I asked a former oil trader about this and he said, "Every oil trader/broker is on it globally. It replaced a large percentage of the voice traffic. It always shocked me that Yahoo never tried to charge for it. Even just a penny per message would be massive."
When an industry is so reliant on one service, it's very difficult to shift an entire industry to a new platform. Segmentation is a real thing.
A good example I'm familiar with is within electronic sports (competitive video-games): almost every executive, player, personality, etc has been using Skype since ~2010. Unfortunately, Skype has a large number of security vulnerabilities and users can be subjected by DDOS attacks- which is especially important if such an attack impacts their performance in a game, or interrupts a livestream. Even though there are, arguably, better products being created that serve the same purpose as Skype and that don't fall victim to this problem (Discord, Slack), those within the industry don't want to segment themselves from everyone else.
What you're thinking of is product lock-in, not segmentation.
Besides, many superior solutions exist and have for a long time: TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, Mumble. Skype is laggy, buggy, and high memory overhead, without mentioning the DDOS risk (exposes IP).
Truthfully I would not consider TeamSpeak, Ventrillo, or Mumble as a superior solution. The benefit of Skype has always been that it dod not require joining more than one server. In the article example, consider the line about individuals having their Yahoo username on their badge.
This problem could be solved if we fixed our tech access and intellectual property laws. The constricting elements of the online network effect only exist because we have laws that grant artificial monopolies. The only reason that Discord and/or Slack and/or OtherAlternative can't make it seamless is because Microsoft/Skype would likely file a lawsuit. While there are hairy intellectual property issues at play here, MS's best vein of attack would be the CFAA, which would almost certainly criminalize something like Slack connecting to Skype's network to offer an adapter/bridge between the two networks.
People comment on the queer nature of this phenomenon frequently but seemingly fail to understand that it's that way because We The People made up laws dictating that it should be that way. There is no deprivation of either possession or use of property here, so why did we make this illegal? Let's fix the problem and allow true competition, instead of protecting lumbering incumbents.
Doesn't this article feel like it was written for Yahoo's benefit? Since they have a blinded bidding process (See [1]), it seems as if this article could help drum up higher bids. Maybe Yahoo is the anonymous source that provided the "hot tip" about commodity traders on Yahoo Messenger.
I don't know about the timing, but I have a relative in the industry and he told me it's actually the case. Everyone and their mom is on Yahoo chat when it comes to commodities.
confirming, ex-gf who is commodity trader (coal, energy and oil lately) mentioned yahoo chat all the time. most of them are not very tech-savvy, so they are happy with it as long as it works
I'm not sure it's a positive story. It suggests that yahoo will migrate these customers to a new platform that doesn't support the features they like and legally need.
> In Geneva, the epicenter of Switzerland’s $21 billion commodity-trading industry, accounting for about one-third of the world’s daily oil transactions
That's pretty impressive for a country that has never even been visited by an oil tanker.
It sounds like Yahoo has wasted one opportunity after another.
Yahoo clearly did not know why the oil industry is using Yahoo Messenger. Instead of doubling down and building a product for that market, they build a replacement product that's going to be detached from the needs of its users.
I have no idea what harbourmasters and oil traders do. But pretend harbourmasters look at maps and use the radio a lot, and oil traders like to look at positions of oil tankers, and charts of oil futures prices, a Yahoo Oil Messenger that lets users embed maps with positions of ships, charts of commodity prices within the conversation itself, view log of recorded radio transmissions, might be very useful. If Slack is worth $3.8 billion, I'd say a Yahoo Oil Messenger could be a billion dollar business, building an industry specific communications product.
It's like Yahoo had all these tenements for the past decade and it's only when the tenements are expiring they finally found out there's bonanza of gold beneath, but it's way too late to do anything about it. With the new Yahoo chat product, it's like they registered some tenements next to their present ones and say something like "hey we got something nearby so it'll be alright."
I know someone in the oil industry and was surprised by this as well, but it is absolutely true. They really do use Yahoo a lot.
When I asked why they haven't switched, I was given a response similar to what the articles says, "that all regulatory and internal controls are addressed"
I believe natural gas communication is still done by AIM a lot.
> natural gas communication is still done by AIM a lot
Lots of U.S. securities trading happens over AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). When I traded equity derivatives, I'd have three communication tools open: internal IM, Bloomberg chat and AIM.
All these niches need real focus. Yahoo! was built on a generalist/populist bent, which is why they initially succeeded but also why they found so hard to keep up: you simply can't be the right thing for everyone all the time, but there is also a real risk in taking your products apart. How would you manage a migration from open-to-all YMessenger to industry-specific YCommodityTradingMessenger...? You would basically have to double your maintenance costs in the short run, duplicating a lot of code, guarantee interoperability... it's a lot of work, and none of this would get the mainstream exposure Y management always craved.
Yahoo has a huge number of services that remained popular with different groups of people well after they should have gone to dot.com hell - yahoo groups,answers, finance etc. I attribute their neglect to poor management and misplaced priorities. Yahoo could have been quora, instagram, pinterest etc. even well after those upstarts arrived on the scene.
A lot of big tech companies also use Yahoo chat. Salesforce did as late as 2012 when I left, with 1k+ people in the eng org. (No idea if they still do).
Doubtful; Yahoo stopped supporting OS X in the last couple years with the official YIM client, and the service is completely unreliable on the platform with 3rd party clients, with messages randomly failing to be delivered. Pretty much any company with non-Windows users has been forced to migrate away, including my workplace (thank Jebus).
One thing Yahoo has is an excellent university recruiting program with bombastic pampering, puzzle challenges, and hackathons. Seeing what other companies also have extremely hyped up university recruitment programs, I almost treat it now as a negative signal for a company's future success. I suppose the harder you have to try to win graduates' hearts, the less appealing you are to work for, and consequently, the worse off of a company you are going to be without the right kind of talent on staff going forward.
The oil traders could move to WhatsApp or somesuch but I'd be kind of sad if they went. The other day I was trying to get free historical stock data via an API and Yahoo Finance was about the only thing that did it ok.
Yahoo could assure their financial future by going massively long oil futures and then putting out false messages about Saudi Arabia having been nuked by ISIS or some such. A tad illegal perhaps but an offshoot in some ill policed part of the world could do it.
Can you record your conversations (I think you can)? But most importantly, can you use WhatsApp without a cell phone number? It has to be tied to your email address and not a cell phone.
This sort of blew my mind when I discovered it since I often travel with a second phone and realized to my horror that I could not be logged into the same whatsapp from two phones. Is this the promise of a mobile-first app world?
It's the side effect of running a very learn architecture. It also has a side effect of not being able to secretly subpoena your chat history after the fact too. Now with E2E encryption they can't even do that easily.
Out of genuine curiosity: how often are traders taking physical delivery? Don't they just roll contracts forward? Why do they even care what the (figurative) harbormaster is doing/saying?
I absolutely see the reason for the ops side to be on YIM. But the traders? At the end of the day, in well regulated markets, that's just asking for trouble when the regulators come calling.
If they're talking about traders "in Geneva", they're talking about physical traders. Can't speak for oil which we didn't trade but for ags and metals, you would take delivery since it's your business (getting stuff from A to B).
Speculation on price is not done by taking paper positions in one direction, but by limiting or increasing your paper hedge, aka trading the "basis" or margin between your physical and your paper.
The physical side requires a fair amount of "RTFC" ("caring what the harbormaster is saying") and being aware of operations.
As an example we were given in training, one of our grains trader went to inspect a ship before loading it with grain, and the local guy thought something was dodgy so he closed the doors, and shone his torch at the walls. Thousands of "stars" blinked back at them. Turns out the ship had been used recently to carry broken glass, which obviously made it highly unsuitable for grains.
But the more common stuff is e.g. overloading the ship on one side so that it leans on the side you know the controller will measure the load, or playing with the percentage admixture (basically dead beasts and dirt) to net yourself a bit more margin.
The goings on at the port will have an impact on the price, and that's what the traders care about.
Lets say there's some problem at a port (bad weather, labor strike, whatever) that causes delays in the delivery of (other people's) oil, traders are still going to be interested because it will push up the price, even though if they're not taking delivery from that particular ship.
The financial pain will be many times the cost of a Bloomberg terminal if market participants are unable to provide communications transcripts when regulators come calling.
I don't believe the article to be ridiculous at all.
I work in physical trading and use yahoo on a daily basis to trade swaps, execute physical deals, and chat with customers. If yahoo were to drop support unexpectedly, there would be a pretty large problem.
We have already been briefed by our IT departments that we are moving to another service with the front end being one of the following - IceChat(from the ICE exchange), Reuters, Bloomberg, Trillian. Although Yahoo will be the back-end in protocol sense, I believe that will be phased out once the trade migrates to another service.
It's a bigger problem than most imagine and can't be executed at a drop of a hat due to legal compliance in logging all communications in the case something went awry or other similar situations.
High tech but often as cheap as stallholders. I did tech support for one big firm at some point, and their IT was shockingly old. I asked why and was told that's how you shave profits in lean years -- which is fair enough. When you've been around as long as these guys have been, your priorities probably don't include "being fashionably high-tech".
Nah, don't you know that the oil industry is just digging holes. Real high-tech is working on hard problems like how to deliver grilled cheese sandwiches
Organic and gluten free oil should not be too hard. Locally sourced is pretty location-dependent. Artisanal may take more work; whether one considers petroleum vegan is an interesting philosophical question.
I sense a business opportunity here; perhaps artisanal, organic, locally sourced oil sandwiches?
Did you read all of the article. There is the problem of not everyone adopting the same chat service. Yahoo messenger works because everyone happens to have adopted it.
