Yahoo has a new CEO. Oh I'm sorry, "Yahoo!". It's good to see they brought in someone from Google; for many years Yahoo has been in denial about being a tech company, instead insisting that they're a media company.
And that's kind of the problem; Yahoo turned itself into the sort of company that 90's businessmen imagined would dominate today. It's a portal site, with multimedia content from converged sources . It's a collection of stale buzzwords.
What's frustrating is that with hindsight they could have created a number of huge businesses that actually existed. They were the site to find things on the web, but gave it up and let Google dominate the world. They bought Geocities, which was essentially a proto-social-network, but did nothing with it. They were an early player in Instant Messaging, but could turn it into a Twitter-like service. And they bought Flickr, which could have been as big as Instagram.
One way out of their problems might be to try to retroactively build their rag-tag collection of services into the do-it-all social network it should have been. Maybe then fed up Facebook users will finally make good on their threats to leave after the annual unneeded redesign. But I won't bet my RIM stock on it.
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