“Yahoo! is doing some spring cleaning.”:http://in.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyID=2007-05-09T160632Z_01_NOOTR_RTRJONC_0_India-297354-1.xml They announced today they would be “retiring” Yahoo! Auctions. No real surprise. Traffic stunk versus EBay. It was a mediocre me-too product. This comes on the heels of announcing that “Yahoo! Photos”:http://photos.yahoo.com was getting folded into “Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com .
I think this is great. Yahoo! has too many products. Jerry Yang used to refer to his homepage as the “I didn’t know Yahoo! did that” page. Yahoo! extended itself into so many areas that it would be inevitable not all of them would be successful.
I think shuttering some of the properties will be better for users, resources will get focussed on properties that have users. And good for their business by putting budgets in areas where there is more potential to be dominant.
I always like “Jack Welch’s”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch model. GE was either number one in a market or number two trying to be number one. If they weren’t, they got out.
written by Jon Lax
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