Searching for a strategy
You've got to feel for Yahoo shareholders; two and a half years after the Yahoo board rejected a bid from Microsoft of $33 per share to acquire it - arguing it would return better shareholder value if it remained independent - the share price is still half that figure and the board appears no closer to turning things around.
Yahoo laid-off four percent of its work-force earlier this week, mainly from product groups. This was confirmed when Allthingsd published the internal memo from Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz to all employees detailing the move.
"...it's no secret that we're cutting investment in underperforming and non-core products so we can focus on our strengths (like email, the homepage, search, mobile, advertising, content and more)," wrote Bartz.
Then a former Yahoo employee tweeted what was apparently an internal Yahoo slide detailing products that were going to be canned. Yahoo has created a euphemistic category called ‘sunset' and in the slide several Yahoo products were put in that category. These included link-sharing service del.icio.us, venerable search product Alta Vista and Yahoo Buzz.
While Yahoo hasn't confirmed the legitimacy of this slide, it has issued a statement in which it said it plans to shut down Yahoo Buzz. That, at least, would seem to confirm the terminal nature of the ‘sunset' euphemism.
Yahoo is trying to define what it actually is, which is sorely needed as we struggle to put our finger on it. with the Microsoft search deal it has given up on its struggle to hold off Google in search and now wants to be an Internet services and content company. Some of its products, like mail and IM, still seem to be quite extensively used, but with this decade set to be dominated by mobile, Yahoo lacks a platform on which to optimise even these offerings.
