19 Nov Yahoo! 360°’s closure: Yang vs Kollar
I wanted to talk about Yahoo! 360°’s closure rumours. That is a big issue in Viet Nam where 90% of the internet users are using Yahoo! services. But it is also a big question in the Geek world (I poke Marion ^^). Here is the official position of Yahoo! through its CEO Jerry Yang and the comment of one user, Larry Kollar. Nothing to add but that I totally share Larry Kollar’s opinion…
Yang:
There’s been much curiosity and speculation about what’s been happening here at Yahoo! over the past few months. Roughly 100 days into our business review, I’m ready to start sharing some of the framework for where we see the future of Yahoo!. (…)
We had to determine which businesses to invest in, and which to begin to exit or de-emphasize. What we ultimately saw was massive untapped potential and the opportunity to achieve things few companies on the planet could accomplish. (…)
We’re placing our bets in three big multi-year objectives. Let me walk you through them, what they mean, and what kind of actions support them:
1. Become the starting point for the most consumers (…)
2. Become the must-buy for advertisers (…)
3. Deliver open, industry-leading platforms that attract the most publishers and developers (…)
Our new decision-making framework also informed what we’d no longer invest in. To start, we’ve de-emphasized our focus on subscription music in favor of ad-supported music, migrated Yahoo! Photos to Flickr, we intend to transition Yahoo! 360 to a more integrated Yahoo! “profile” experience, we’ve closed Yahoo! Podcasts and plan to shut down a number of one-off services, and we’re currently assessing our options for our Kelkoo comparison shopping service in Europe. We’ve identified still more areas and we’ll continue to work through them. (…)
We’re in the midst of our transformation and seeing some initial progress. There’s hard work ahead, along with a large and growing market opportunity. If we execute as planned, I’m confident we’ll be creating substantial long-term value for our users, advertisers, publishers, and developers – and, of course, for our shareholders.
Jerry Yang
CEO and Chief Yahoo
Kollar:
You really need to take another look at 360 and how passionate its users are about it. Yahoo!360 somehow became “Myspace for grownups,” perhaps without intent, and certainly without a lot of support or communication from the 360 Team. People are leaving 360 *right now* because they’re expecting it to turn into yet another pre-teen thing come January. Look at the over 900 comments on the latest 360 Product blog post, and you’ll see how many people care deeply about this service.
How many users were on 360? Two million? (minus the thousands that have already left) Can Yahoo really afford to alienate that many people? I don’t really believe Yahoo wants to lose those users, but lose them you will if you don’t start communicating in *detail* about the changes that are coming. How many more users would there have been on 360 had the 360 Team been proactive with bug fixes and communication? How wildly popular might it have been had Yahoo been promoting it? (I started a blog on Blogger about a month after 360 first rolled out, because I didn’t know 360 existed at the time.)
Look into how you can make the passion work for you… because right now, it’s working against you.
Larry Kollar
Marion
Posted at 09:03h, 20 novembreWhereas in France, 90 % of the people are using the search engine of Google, and that the most frequent search on Yahoo’s is « Google »
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