This is a sad one. Venerable Yahoo, the original web portal, is in such trouble that it doesn’t know what to do. So Yahoo will this year begin tearing itself apart.
This will be presented as a semblance of a strategy but I doubt that’s true. More likely it will be the company attempting to maintain or even increase earnings by selling its seed corn. So look for Yahoo to dispose of its huge assets in China, to sell the part that it owns of Yahoo Japan, and to spin-off photo-sharing site Flickr as a separate company.
It will make the stock look great… for awhile.
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Fascinating. But wouldn’t they want to do just the opposite, if they’re planning on becoming an acquisition target of aol… or anybody?
Frankly, this makes sense. I’ve always thought the best future for Yahoo! was to break it up.
It would have been better if it had been done when the original founders of things like Flickr, del.icio.us etc. were still around. It’s not obvious that they have such a great future now. Though someone smart could surely still do something exciting with Flickr, or Pipes or MyBlogLog.
Odd. Millions of users and not a single USP.
Yahoo! Why?
It’s no real loss.
I miss what Yahoo used to be, before they got gigantism — one guy’s list of bookmarks, evolved into a category system that anyone could get a site into.
Then they started charging $200 just to be considered. I would have understood a reasonable fee given the amount of spam out there, but $200?
Then they shoved the categories list into a closet and became an ad-ridden portal, with fewer features and more ads than competitors. They may have been the first major portal, but they abused their position. They ended up slow and underfeatured (e.g. making users pay for POP), and really overdid the ads.
I’m not a free Internet revolutionary. I understand the need for ads. But there are reasonable limits and having two columns of ads and top and bottom strips with a little content in the middle was never reasonable. Especially when users’ emails had little ads on the bottom, too.
And yes, I’d have absolutely no remorse for losing ebay if someone else managed to get any share with a faster, better-designed system and better anti-sleaze methods. But since the average person can’t disassociate ebay from online auctions, that won’t happen…
Sadly, you more likely right on this one – if not this year, then sometime within the next couple years.
I’ve had a paid Yahoo! Email account for quite a few years (5+), and am not looking to move elsewhere for the same kind of service. While I have centralized my email around my Yahoo! account, it has come time to part – not the least of which is due to occasional issues with their service and the lack of ability to get help in a timely manner – or even reaching a person directly via phone.
The interference of Microsoft/Bing is also a big issue, especially as the Bing area in Yahoo! Mail’s interface likes to grab the cursor (so when I press ‘k’ to mark email as read, it goes to Bing’s input field instead of doing what I wanted – that _never_ happened prior to Bing being integrated).
Of course, it is also due to them shuttering Geo-Cities, where I had long hosted a personal website to complement my resume, and other services I used as well. They seem less interested in keeping business than ever before.
At one point, there services were good enough that one could overlook some of the issues – e.g. you didn’t need to contact anyone for help as things typically just worked.
Sad, but long coming since Microsoft & Carl Icahn subverted Yahoo! a while back – resulting in the Bing integration nonetheless.
Interesting post Bob,
– The key challenge is that Yahoo! won’t be able to squeeze anywhere near the market value of its Asian assets because it will be a fire sale and governments are likely to be involved. I suspect that is why Bartz hasn’t done this already
– I would expect the non-Greater China and Japan Asian businesses – Taiwan, Vietnam, Indonesia etc to be spun off or sold to likes of South African conglomerate Naspers
One of the key question marks has to be the European properties.
A few days ago Yahoo implemented some “improvements” which made many parts of their service unusable for me. I was without email for about a day and a half. Yesterday they started fixing or reversing whatever they did, and things started working again. The heart of the “improvements” seemed to be for the delivery of advertisements. If you break the website, it doesn’t matter if you have ads.
Yahoo has all the symptoms of a deeply troubled company. They don’t have a healthy focus on their customers, services, and business. They don’t understand quality. They are just going through the motions and don’t seem to have a plan or vision. It is sad to watch.
Yahoo could be saved and could be great again. But they have to want it. They need a better leadership team.
Beg to differ about Yahoo ever being great. There’s a reason Google caught on and passed them like they were standing still. User satisfaction with Yahoo was not that reason.
Everything you say here has been true of Yahoo since it first showed up in the 1990s:
‘Yahoo has all the symptoms of a deeply troubled company. They don’t have a healthy focus on their customers, services, and business. They don’t understand quality. They are just going through the motions and don’t seem to have a plan or vision. It is sad to watch.’
Amen. And we’ve been watching that sad show for two decades.
Yahoo’s record is what it is. Yahoo pages look spammy. Yahoo treats your uploaded materials as its own. Yahoo has an opt-in for spam, then decides on whim to switch to opt-out–sending a deluge of jnk mail to the last people who wanted it. (All the worst habits of Facebook find their prototype in Yahoo.) Yahoo sells your domain to squatters if you decide to host elsewhere. Yahoo censors its content in China and even turns over account information for democracy activists.
What’s to like?
Flickr is a good service. It’s a keeper. I hope Google gets it. Flickr is the kind of fast, crisp, searchable feature you associate with Google at its best. And it’s only fair. Google is how thousands of Flickr’s original account holders first learned about the service. Google used to recommend Flickr for image hosting to people starting blogs.
Time to say ‘Thanks, Yahoo, for not very much’ and toss on some dirt.
I think he made it clear that it was user dissatisfaction with Yahoo that’s made it the ghost town it currently is.
I think you’re wrong. Not because it’s the wrong thing for them to do, it’s spot on. It’s the best way for them to extract any value from their assets, but I don’t think they have the guts or the self-honesty to do it.
They’ll continue to dwindle into irrelevance just as they have done for years untill it’s too late to even use this strategy.
What is yahoo? What is aol? I can’t remember the last time I even thought about either one. Who cares?
For that matter, what is Cringely? As a media artifact I predate both AOL and Yahoo. How do I retain MY relevance?
Well actually you’re still really interesting. I first became aware of you with a couple of TV shows you had which aired in the UK about 15 years ago (you built a plane) and for a time I kept up with your sage observations online. Trouble is, one’s attention is spread so thinly by so much stuff (BBC Radio 4, newspapers, New Scientist, the PM Programme, Newsnight, e-mail, spam, phones, internet porn, the Telegraph crossword, Facebook, YouTube, my wife, even work) that some things just sort of go out of focus and get forgotten (a bit like your plane!). I come back to you for a few weeks every couple of years and wish I could sacrifice the sleep to read you every day. Sorry.
Former household names like Cello, Netscape, CompuServe, Gateway 2000, Silicon Graphics all seemed like big players once, you’re still here. Well done and best wishes.
I’m not a free Internet revolutionary.
I understand the need for ads.
But there are reasonable limits and having two columns of ads and top and bottom strips with a little content in the middle was never reasonable.
Yahoo is going down everyday. Google is the most powerful Internet business.
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Everyone that I know who uses Yahoo mail is switching to gmail because they don’t want stupid ads attached to their emails. Yahoo will become out of site and out of mind.
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[…] predicted that Yahoo would barf, by which I meant (and wrote that I meant) the company would begin exploring the sale of its […]