Yahoo! Axes! Yet! More! Products! Yahoo! chief Marissa Mayer is taking her scythe to more product lines as she funnels resources into mobile in an attempt to take the beleaguered web giant into more profitable climes. The company will axe its Yahoo! Deals, Yahoo! SMS Alerts, Yahoo! Kids, and the Yahoo! Mail and Messenger feature phone apps, executive platform …
Yahoo used to be my domain name provider. I had to find out from an online article they were going to jack my rates 2.5x without warning. I shifted everything over to Bluehost and escaped the fee. They lost my trust.
That was pre-Marissa by a long stretch. I like what I see now and am starting to warm to the idea of a kinder, gentler Yahoo. Broken trust though, it takes a long time to repair. I see them working on it.
@Tom 35,
I suggest you take you own advice and read the story.
While the story did say this:
"The company will axe its Yahoo! Deals, Yahoo! SMS Alerts, Yahoo! Kids, and the Yahoo! Mail and Messenger feature phone apps, executive platform veep Jay Rossiter wrote in a blogpost."
It also said this:
""We realize that change is hard, but by making tough decisions like these we can focus our energy on building beautiful products for you like the two we introduced this week - Yahoo! Mail for iPad and Android tablets and Yahoo! Weather for iPhone," Rossiter wrote."
So, they are making apps for smartphones that could be covered by a proper HTML5 implementation. The Asha series from Nokia supports HTML5; they are a feature phone.
@Daniel B.,
Then explain Google hat which is browser base; Yahoo IM is also included in Yahoo Mail when using a browser, you have Microsoft doing the same with Outlook/Hotmail in that it has what was MSN Messenger in the browser. Even with HTML it is near instantaneous as it does go to a back end server so that your conversation history is saved. So using HTML is not any slower; it uses TCP/IP. If you really want to get technical; most of the "client" IM programs are already running over TCP/80 and some of which are purely HTML based.
"Why do they need apps at all? Wouldn't supporting HTML5 be a better and safer bet?"
You must be saying this because you have never developed HTML5. It's a complete utter mess. You have to support a multitude of browsers, mobile phones, with all different flavors.
It's much cheaper to make an ios and android app.
BTW, fecesbook went the html way. It was a complete disaster.
@csumpi,
How about the other reason is that you have smart phones and feature phones. There is also more than just Android and iOS out there as well. If you create an HTML5 moble site, you cover all smart phones and feature phones. You also don't have to worry about "updating" an app as all you do is update the site. Since the type of apps require Internet connectivity anyway, little reason not to use HTML5.
We need to cut until we're profitable, so the board can award us bonuses with money we really don't have. But seriously, she seems to be throwing shit at the wall and hoping some of it sticks. @ Matt Bucknall: I agree. While I didn't really care for a lot of Yahoo's offerings, there were a couple I used. But after watching the utter cluelessness of the current officers, why not just liquidate the remaining assets of the corporation and give it back to the share holder(s), assuming there are any left.
Yahoo is better off selling off those not to popular/not so producing products to someone else that can benefit/refine them into gold. Yahoo has always seemed to give up instead of fight for market share and throw away things than reap some profit out of it. These products that will be gone is not for me to cry about, it's about the loss of jobs that now these professionals will go elsewhere and perhaps will create the same wheel under the name of a new company.
I use Yahoo Groups. The interface sucks and sadly, nobody has worked on it in ages.
I can see deleting the "Kids" stuff. It's not really a demographic with much money to spend.
Rather than just taking a chain saw to everything in sight, Y! should try to come up with a package of apps that compliment each other and aren't just clones of everybody else's junk. How many IM services are needed?
When Google consolidated their privacy policies and really started selling user data in a much larger way, I signed off of everything but my mail account and I am slowing migrating everybody who contacts me via that channel to other addresses I use. Competition is essential and Yahoo is pretty much the only balance to Google. I don't count M$ as they don't seem to stay in market segments very long and that makes it hard to rely on them for online services.
I'm an old fashioned guy and I don't use my WEB browser for mail, word processing, PIM and calendar duties. I find online offerings bland and lacking in the features that are important to me. I have also had several occasions where I was able to pull information out of my email program (certainly not Outlook) while not online to get an important phone number. If I would have had to find a Hot Spot to logon for the information, I would have been late for an important meeting and another time I would have missed a flight. I do back things up online to my own servers just in case, but what does Amazon care if I am inconvenienced by a cloud service outage? The answer is a resounding "not at all" and there is no way I can throw money at the problem to get it resolved, which is my acid test for outside services.
"I use Yahoo Groups. The interface sucks and sadly, nobody has worked on it in ages."
That's why it's stable. They don't keep tampering with it every few weeks like farcebook. I'm on a number of groups and they work well as mailing lists. I don't use the web site much except to look for archived posts.
Yahoo Mail (online) would be much more tolerable for me if it worked correctly on a netbook display instead of stuff going off the bottom of the screen (the older version works just fine). It is kinda like how the latest incarnation of YouTube no longer fits a 1024px display. All this clever scripting and they can't do something as simple as make the content fit the screen.
I noticed that Yahoo is getting rid of their classic email service,which for me is good bye to Yahoo. i don't use their email service that much these days anyway, so not much of a problem.
Classic email don't get spied on like the new mail service, which they now use to track keywords and throw adverts with those keywords back at us.
I have already started to move the couple of auto emails to GMX or even my own domain.
You overestimate ones abilities Marisa is a joke, a PR stunt by Yahoo! to show how different and cool they are. Unfortunately for them her abilities are very limited. She has turned Yahoo in to bread and circus according to my friend who has worked there for some years now and have seen a few ceo's. There is a good word for people like her: a lucky chancer, was at the right place at the right time and perhaps complained enough to be pushed up Google ladder and then left. Perfecr example that investors have no bloody idea. I can not wait to see her fail.
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