Yahoo’s “all hands” meeting from last week created a huge stir when someone inside the meeting, likely a disgruntled laid-off employee, snapped photos of the “Sunset Slide” (below). The meeting was about the company’s plans moving forward and included several current acquisitions and spinoffs that are slated for “sunset” (corp. speak for “dumped”) and others that will be merged and “featured.”
Yahoo owns several properties that are both popular and unprofitable and has acquired a lot of Web real estate that is definitely not within the company’s focus. Assuming it has one, which many would doubt.
Yahoo has been fighting for market share (and losing) on just about every front. They aren’t the Internet’s most popular search engine, Web analyzer, advertising venue, or anything else. Nevertheless, they have a lot of popular sites and properties that own their categories and need only be monetized – Delicious (the social bookmarking site) is one of those.
That doesn’t seem to be interesting Yahoo, however, who has all but confirmed that they’ll be dumping Delicious and several other brands to “streamline” their offerings. Yet again, their strategy makes no sense.
According to Alexa, of the half a dozen or so services to be killed, Delicious is by far the most popular. Yet of the services to be merged (including Foxytunes and Sideline), none of them are anywhere close to the traffic snaggers that Delicious and AltaVista are.
Further, the “Make Feature” column of the list of things to be added are, well, ripoffs. Replace “Yahoo!” with “Google” on that list and you have the current swatch of Google add-ons for various services like Gmail and Docs with only a couple of exceptions.
It appears, by this list, that Yahoo’s big plan is to compete with the Google Giant. A competition that, frankly, they’ve tried and lost already. Yahoo appears to still e desperately searching for its life’s quest and flounders in the attempt.
