Yahoo Slashes Products

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Could we be witnessing the beginning of the end for Yahoo?

This morning search engine Yahoo announced that it is slashing eight of its products, including the social bookmarking site Delicious (formerly Del.icio.us). The full eight are: Delicious, Yahoo! Buzz, Yahoo! Bookmarks, MyBlogLog, AltaVista, Yahoo! Picksâ€which will all be shut down, while Yahoo People Search and Fire Eagle will be merged, and Yahoo! Alerts and Yahoo Calendar will become features.

This is fresh on the heels of massive layoffs at the company, 560 employees to be exact, and is prompting many to wonder if the search engine is fading away because of the gaining market share of new ones like Bing!.

Some of the products being slashed were very recently acquired, such as Delicious, a social bookmarking site depended on by many businesses, including SEO companies, to get the word out about cool new products, services and information. It is not clear why Yahoo would want to shut down Delicious, which was founded as Del.icio.us by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and had garnered more than 5.3 million users by 2008, three years after Yahoo ...
... had acquired it.

Other products bought buy by Yahoo at the height of their profitability, such as MyBlogLog created by Eric Marcoullier, were swiftly neglected by the company afterward purchase. In fact, it was Marcoullier who leaked the information about the products being slashed through a Twitter post, for which he has been soundly criticized by the remaining current Yahoo employees.

Although some of the products were generated in-house, Yahoo has been forced to issue a statement. They claim that the layoffs and shut downs are part of an,

“…organizational streamlining [that] involves cutting our investment in underperforming or off-strategy products to …focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation…”

However, this does not sit well with many people who don’t believe that all the products being slashed fit into the “underperforming” category. Users and online businesses are most upset about the shutting down of Delicious, a tool which allows people to save, share and manage web links, to which Yahoo has issued only a vague follow up. Their response basically says they are still running it right now and will let us know more when appropriate.

That isn’t the most encouraging response for many in the technology community. It may signal that Yahoo isn’t in touch with what users consider their most useful products, hence the neglect shown to Marcoullier’s MyBlogLog. The only service Yahoo has absolutely confirmed is to be axed is Yahoo! Buzz, but they have not denied allegations that the others are to be axed as well. A memo written by Yahoo!’s chief executive Carol Bartz explaining shut down the products to employees was leaked to AllThingsD earlier in the week.

In the SEO community, we have been watching Yahoo slowly decline over the past year in the face of Google’s domination. Businesses have had to focus their efforts more on targeting Google’s reach. Now that Microsoft has issued Yahoo a lifeline through adCenter by making a PPC campaign targeted to reach both Yahoo and to Bing! users more worth doing for online businesses, it makes us wonder if yahoo was worse off than we all imagined.

Guess the only thing to do is wait and see if the giant is truly fading and online SEO outlets like Delicious along with it.