Yahoo to cut seven products including BlackBerry app

Yahoo has announced that seven products will be shut down in a spring cleaning of company services. The product shutdowns were announced by Yahoo via its corporate blog. The shutdowns appear to mimic the way that Google regularly trims underperforming and unpopular services to redeploy talent on more useful products. New Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer must have thought this was a good policy to bring from Google to Yahoo.

What’s been cut?

Yahoo avatars (From 1 April. Before that date you can download your existing avatar and re-upload it to your Yahoo Profile page)
Yahoo app for BlackBerry (It will no longer be available to download or be updated but will continue to function)
Yahoo clues
Yahoo app search
Yahoo sports IQ
Yahoo message boards website (Message boards upon other Yahoo sites will continue to be active)
Yahoo updates API

Jay Rossiter, EVP, Platforms at Yahoo wrote that the products were only cut “after much thought and deliberation”. The most critical factor the management look at when deciding whether to cut a service is “whether the experience is truly a daily habit that still resonates for all of you today” according to Rossiter.

Just as you might have thought, the trimming of these less popular products will allow Yahoo to focus on improving the popular products like Flikr and Mail. “By continuing to hone in on our core products and experiences, we’ll be able to make our existing products the very best they can be,” explained the Yahoo corporate blog.

No more work at home Yahoos

Also in Yahoo news last week there was a bit of a storm in a teacup following the adoption of another Google policy – workers should be in the office. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that CEO Mayer checked through Yahoo VPN logs to see if remote employees were often checking in during their time out of the office, “Mayer discovered they were not — and her decision was made.” Since that announcement there has been quite a debate about whether teleworking is still the future of office work.

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Hmm, can't remember the last time I went to Yahoo for anything. In fact, if I've visited the sites in the last year it'll have been because some other link sent me there.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that CEO Mayer checked through Yahoo VPNlogs to see if remote employees were often checking in during their time out of the office, “Mayer discovered they were not — and her decision was made.” Since that announcement there has been quite a debate about whether teleworking is still the future of office work.

Oh great, these idiots decide to slack off and potentially screw it up for the rest of us! :censored: Then again, I'm one of those folks who teleworks because there's no office locally I can use - so if a teleworking ban comes into force then I'm out of a job entirely.

I still use Yahoo mail as I still like being able to sort my mail the old fashioned way (folders, not label). Only at home though, because of the lack of full session HTTPS (log in only).

Here in Japan, Yahoo Auction is probably better than Ebay for local goods.

crossy
Oh great, these idiots decide to slack off and potentially screw it up for the rest of us! :censored: Then again, I'm one of those folks who teleworks because there's no office locally I can use - so if a teleworking ban comes into force then I'm out of a job entirely.

There are some people who don't abuse it. However most do in my experience, and I ran work-from-home VPNs for companies for a long time. Generally it is middle managers who are ‘working from home to complete a report’ are the worst urine-takers.

Combine that with the massively increased support costs for people who think it is IT's problem that they have a cheap nasty consumer grade ADSL line and they can't get any work done over it.

wasabi
There are some people who don't abuse it. However most do in my experience, and I ran work-from-home VPNs for companies for a long time. Generally it is middle managers who are ‘working from home to complete a report’ are the worst urine-takers.

You're right in that it's managers that can make or break teleworking - if someone's slacking off then it's their manager to blame. Just because someone's at home doesn't mean that you can't keep a track on them (and no, I don't mean spyware etc).

Richard Branson's not impressed either, see http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/blog/give-people-the-freedom-of-where-to-work:

If you provide the right technology to keep in touch, maintain regular communication and get the right balance between remote and office working, people will be motivated to work responsibly, quickly and with high quality. Working life isn't 9-5 any more. The world is connected. Companies that do not embrace this are missing a trick

If you read the complete story about the teleworking I think you'll see that the biggest issue is that the majority of people had been taking the p**s for a considerable time and it was this culture that Marissa was targeting not the whole teleworking culture. All she did was simply check the VPN logs to see that people were out and about supposedly teleworking but didn't actually VPN in at all during certain days. If you get a sloppy culture like that over several years and you are a paid CEO in a big company and tasked with turning it around surely you'd be mad not to tackle it at source. If that means getting people into the office then so be it. Wasabi hit the nail on the head, most people I know manage very little from home and need to be managed very carefully

Yahoo to cut seven products including BlackBerry app

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