Flickr Should Have Built Instagram. But They Didn't. Here's Why.
Back in June, we reported on the departure of Kellan Elliott-McCrea from Yahoo. While not hugely known outside the developer community, we had received several tips indicating just how important Elliott-McCrea was to the Flickr team …
Context & Ripple Effects
The argument lands at a bleak moment for Flickr's parent. In mid-December 2010, CEO Carol Bartz announced layoffs in a company-wide letter, a heavy Flickr user published an open letter to her voicing concern for the service's future, and Yahoo's botched sunsetting announcement for Delicious triggered an escalating PR backlash that was eroding consumer confidence across its portfolio. The piece itself is written by someone who spent three years running product for Delicious at Yahoo before leaving more than two years ago — an insider's postmortem, not an outsider's hot take.
The departure of Kellan Elliott-McCrea — confirmed here as critically important to the Flickr team despite being little known outside the developer community — extends an exodus that began with the co-founders' own exits, covered in ReadWriteWeb's 2008 look at the founders on their way out and Butterfield and Henderson's 2009 move into a stealth start-up. The analysis claims Flickr had the opportunity to build an Instagram-like product and failed to do so.
First-order effects
- Yahoo loses one of the few engineers considered critical to Flickr at precisely the moment layoffs and the Delicious backlash have the remaining team demoralized — compounding the attrition that already took the co-founders out the door.
- The analysis puts a name on Flickr's strategic gap: with no mobile-first photo-sharing product of its own, Yahoo concedes the fastest-growing slice of consumer photo behavior to startups while its own user base grows anxious about the service's commitment.
Second-order effects
- Each high-profile exit makes the next one cheaper for rivals and recruiters: the pattern of founder departures followed by key engineers signals to Yahoo's other community products that their builders are reachable, raising retention costs across the portfolio.
- Competing mobile photo-sharing apps face an incumbent that is structurally unable to respond — Flickr's large existing community becomes an acquisition target for newer services rather than a defensive moat for Yahoo.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Yahoo's consumer properties settle into caretaker mode — original builders gone, new product bets starved — and the value in photo sharing migrates to companies organized around mobile rather than the web archive.
- The Delicious fiasco establishes a template for how users evaluate any aging community service: trust now hinges less on features than on whether the owner visibly invests, which raises the bar for every legacy web property trying to hold its base.
The trend: Yahoo is bleeding the people who built its best-loved consumer services while mobile-native challengers attack photo sharing from below — a data point in the larger shift of community web products from strategic assets to neglected holdings.