On Yahoo’s Fall From Grace And Other Links
I am always interested in stories about Yahoo! since I worked there during its Internet hey day. Unfortunately, the place is falling apart. The latest I have heard is of a 5% staff cut, combined with employee buyouts and the sunsetting of some pretty major brands like Alta Vista, the first major Internet search engine and Delicious, a bookmark tool I love and use religiously. I also know that Mark Thoma and Brad DeLong use it as well. I am moving to a new service called Diigo. Hopefully, that will go well because I used delicious to bookmark all of my links including the ones in this post over the past 2 years. The whole thing is very sad because Yahoo was a great brand but they went on a media-centric focus that allowed Google to supersede them and then it was all down hill. It was criminal that the board didn’t take the Microsoft offer a few years ago.
Cheers.
Sad for my former employer,
Edward
P.S. Here are the links
Yahoo!
- Spabba Gives Your Del.icio.us Bookmarks A New Home
- R.I.P. Delicious: You Were So Beautiful to Me
- Confirmed: Yahoo Closing Buzz, Traffic APIs – Maybe Delicious & AltaVista
Credit Writedowns
- EU Summit Makes Progress, EU Debt Crisis Has Not
- Moody’s slashes Ireland’s credit rating to Baa1 with negative outlook
- Market Is Overbought, Overextended and Overvalued
- Fedex disappoints; should we care?
- (QOTD) Ben Bernanke: It is not the responsibility of the Federal Reserve to protect lenders
- Insight from a Master: Interview with John Hathaway
- Pimco: Emerging Markets Will Outperform
- Sympathy for the Dollar
- Rosenberg: the Europeans can fight nature for only so long
The Usual Fare
- PETROLIO: lo scenario di breve e di medio periodo | IntermarketAndMore
- JPMorgan toppled as biggest US bank by stock market value – Telegraph
- Military Veterans, on the Orszag Situation – James Fallows – Politics – The Atlantic
- Peter Orszag: The Shoe That Didn’t Drop – James Fallows – Politics – The Atlantic
- Putin Speaks His Mind, and Then Some, in Televised Q. and A. – NYTimes.com
- Turkey Rate Cut Very Negative For Turkish Lira, Further Losses Likely
- Ellsberg defends WikiLeaks founder, Army private
- Germany is rising up against Merkel’s euroscepticism – Eurointelligence
- Conglomerate Blog: Why aren’t more bankers going to jail?
- Unorthodox: booming Turkey cuts rates | beyondbrics: News and views on emerging markets | FT.com
- Reporters Jump Senators For Perceived Earmark Hypocrisy : It’s All Politics : NPR
Re-Remics
- Bank of America Re-Remics Cut Mortgage Debt as Basel Rules Loom – Bloomberg
- S&P Cuts to Junk Mortgage Bonds It Rated AAA in 2009 – Bloomberg
- S&P May Reduce 1,196 Securities Tied to Residential Mortgages After Errors – Bloomberg
- Financial Alchemy at Morgan Stanley: Greywolf A3 CDOs now Aaa bonds
Tech Stuff
It’s obvious to me that Yahoo! management have no idea as to the value of some of their assets. For example, in a leaked presentation slide, they list all their brands and failed to mention flickr, one of the most important sites on the web. They have so many users and so many photos that they could become the Facebook of photography with a slight re-design.
Also, Yahoo! News and Sports have been pretty high quality. The sports reporting is strong and it seemed like four or five years ago that Yahoo! was going to put more money in original reporting. If you’ve read the work of Kevin Sites you have to wonder why Yahoo! didn’t continue in that direction. A successful example would be AOL, whose news and commentary were a pleasant surprise.
More about Yahoo! Sports: Overall, they have one of the better fantasy sports products on the Internet. As with flickr, they fail to realize the actual value of their user base here. They could innovate fantasy sports with some modest re-designs and perhaps improve the social networking component of the site. Instead, they’ve basically let it languish for a decade with almost no improvements.