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Yahoo Killing Maps, Pipes & More

Posted by samzenpus on from the so-long dept.

alphadogg writes: Yahoo is shutting down its mapping service, Pipes and reducing the availability of Yahoo TV and Yahoo Music. The company has decided instead to focus on three major parts of its business: search, communications, and digital content. "We made this decision to better align resources to Yahoo's priorities as our business has evolved since we first launched Yahoo Maps eight years ago," says the company.

7 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It's going to be painful... by bobbied · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They got taken over by MBA's too after the founders took their money and ran...

    Facebook and Twitter are next....

    --
    "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
  2. Re:It's going to be painful... by binarylarry · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Google is still run by the founders and early advisors.

    --
    Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
  3. Re:It's going to be painful... by kamapuaa · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yahoo was done down by sloppy engineering. Everybody went to Yahoo for first the curated internet and later (when that proved impossible) internet searches, and the internet searches were terrible. Later Google came along, their results actually good, and there was a sudden migration to a site which could actually get shit done.

    I don't know if MBAs helped or hurt Yahoo's case, but ultimately they were just swapping deck chairs on the Titanic. There's no possible way a site with shitty search results could compete with a site with good search results.

    --
    Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
  4. Re:It's going to be painful... by ron_ivi · · Score: 5, Insightful

    MBA's took over too fast at Yahoo after the founders took their money and ran...

    Even a bit worse than that --- after they watched AOL buy Time Warner they wanted to emulate that they hired some Warner Brothers guy as their CEO who didn't know much about the internet. And they never invest in the technologies they have. Consider all the times they aquired the leading company in a space --- only to *not* invest in it and kill it:

    • Broadcast.com - that Yahoo bought for ~$4 billion - was the leading audio/video site of its time, and could have been Youtube + Hulu + Netflix
    • Geocities.com - that Yahoo bought for ~3 billion - was the leading social network of its time - could have been MySpace+Facebook
    • Egroups - for a half a billion - another social network component.
    • del.icio.us - another social network component
    • Altavista as part of Overture - that Yahoo bought for i-forget-how-much - was the leading search engine of it's time - and yahoo doesn't even use them, preferring to pay competitors for search results.
    • MusicMatch - that coulda been Pandora.

    And such irony that they *now* descide to focus on Search --- after having bought what was once the best search engine on the internet (AltaVista), yet have since then been paying competitors to do search for them.

  5. Re:It's going to be painful... by mrchaotica · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Not to mention, that "Pipes" thing actually looks pretty cool... too bad they never marketed it, so I didn't know it existed until after they decided to shut it down!

    --

    "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

  6. Re:It's going to be painful... by Alomex · · Score: 3, Insightful

    But you forgot to add that they refused to pay 1 million for Larry and Sergei's search engine.... which forced them to go on their own and create Google.

    How's that for a fscked corporate M&A department?

  7. Re: It's going to be painful... by TWX · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You sure you aren't describing langoliers rather than MBAs?

    There's a difference?

    --
    Do not look into laser with remaining eye.