5 Things Yahoo! Does Best & Why It's Not Enough

As good as Yahoo! may be, a chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link. And at Yahoo!, that’s the management. They have plenty of excellent products and services, and the first thing they teach you in Business 101 is: Focus on your strengths. But Yahoo!’s management refuse to do that, instead wasting time developing or purchasing a variety of mediocre content and services that aren’t worth the effort.

When your site is the number one most visited in the entire world and your homepage is the homepage of millions of computer users around the world, you’d have to a total moron to mess that up. Unfortunately, it seems that’s the case. With the amount of money and resources Yahoo! has, it’s rather pointless to keep hitting a broken nail on the (non-existent) head. If something doesn’t work, write it off as a bad job, don’t keep insisting on keeping it alive!

There’s nothing wrong with people leaving your site every once in a while to find something else where. Especially if you know you can’t help them. Who the hell uses Yahoo! for shopping? And when thousands of real free hosting accounts exist, why people continue to opt for GeoCities is beyond us.1 Instead of adding a mediocre version of YouTube to Yahoo!, management should be focused on improving the Fantasy Football interface – after all, that’s something else that Yahoo! does better than the rest!

Who the hell goes to Yahoo! for Real Estate? That’s what eBay is for! And food!? Thousands of recipe sites and tip-columns exist literally all over the web, yet Yahoo! has to stick their overly-long nose where it doesn’t fit. And if Yahoo! owns flickr, what do they need Yahoo! Photos for!? Now that Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger are on the same network, they really really need a new messenger interface to keep people from leaving their client.

If life is about change, business is about how to never stop changing. In the course of 5 or 10 years, it’s natural for the demand for certain products and services to go up, and for other such products/services to go down. There’s nothing wrong with people paying less attention to Yahoo! photos because they now use Yahoo! flickr instead.

That’s Yahoo!’s problem. A refusal to change. Before the mail re-design, it hadn’t changed in 5 or 6 years. And it won’t change again for another half-decade or so. That’s Yahoo!, they have the best of everything (well, some things), but they bungle it all up because they’re not willing to go with the flow. Then of course, their CEO has to stand and make a speech – and the community complains. It’s one big cycle that’s not going to end for a long time.


  1. Well, not really. It’s reliable and free. And crippled. Other services provide much greater flexibility, but there’s not much to be said for their reliability or lifespan… But still! 

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  • 6 thoughts on “5 Things Yahoo! Does Best & Why It's Not Enough

    1. I like Yahoo! and all as much as the other guy (well, maybe a bit more), but, dude, this is Yahoo! we’re talking about here, ya’ know? Come on!

    2. I have to disagree with you there, someone.

      Now that MSN and Yahoo! have merged networks, as TFA suggests, there is absoloutely no reason for Yahoo! users not to abandon YIM, and register their @Yahoo.com addresses with MSN Messenger and use that to contact MSN and Yahoo! clients.

      YIM is too old-fashioned, bloated, and goddamn ugly. MSN Messenger has the edge over it in every single way, and now that the client you choose doesn’t make a difference to your contact list, YIM really needs an overhaul.

    3. Really?  Yahoo! ‘s email has the very best spam control from all three?  Well, my Yahoo mail is always full of spams, that’s way I barely use it now.  I personally like Gmail much more! 

    4. That’s probably because your Gmail account is newer, and is less-known to the spammers. Gmail’s spam protection is second best (very close to Yahoo!), but still Yahoo! is number 1 ATM.    

    5. So true!

      I fit right into every single thing mentioned…

      I use Flickr, have Yahoo.com! as my homepage, my main email address is an @yahoo.com one, and I just left Yahoo!’s instant messenger for MSN’s – same network, 100x better.

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