Marissa Mayer’s rule at Yahoo has not been without controversy. Between the purchase of Tumblr, employee HR issues, and failure of Community, Mayer’s time at Yahoo has been marked by some expensive decisions. The board is apparently considering her continued tenure as CEO as well as the business’ future.
Sometimes, I’m actually a little surprised that Yahoo is still around.
It’s still insanely popular as a portal for news, email and so on. As a search engine yeah…not so much…
I don’t know how Yahoo is still a major player in email. That interface is such a disaster. They also ask you every time you login to link a phone number to your account and there’s no way to turn off that notification. I have click through like 3 screens before I can even to my emails. I used to use Yahoo for junk mail, but it’s not even worth for that anymore.
So many people have Yahoo email address and don’t want to migrate, at least anecdotally.
Yahoo used to be my junk mail address. Then I moved and lost my Optonline main address. So now Yahoo is my main. Mainly because mental inertia (laziness).
Seeee?
I use my phone apps to access all my free email accounts (gmail, yahoo, outlook), so the yuckiness of yahoo mail web interface has no effect on me.
…I better find out how to download my yahoo email archive.
To be fair, Bing powers Yahoo search these days so it is not like they put any effort into it other than branding / ads.
The problem with Yahoo! is that the web portal is dead. People use Facebook; for many Facebook is the web. It’s hella-difficult to combat that.
Marissa has made many sharp moves. Tumblr in particular is actually relevant, if not yet profitable. She reinvested in Flickr, reviving a dying giant. The plan to split off their alibaba holdings was brilliant, although I guess that won’t be happening now. But all that is ancillary to what has always been their core business; the web portal. And I can’t think of any way to salvage that.
Ha…well then…
What the heck is Yahoo’s core business? I didn’t think they actually did anything these days except invest in other companies.
The core audience are people who set their start page to Yahoo seven years ago and have forgotten how to change it.
Gmail doesn’t do this? Hell, I got so annoyed by those messages that I did link my phone number to my account, only to then have it start asking me to link a second phone number to the account. And boy am I glad I linked my number, because now I get to go through the whole authorization process with every device and browser I use, for both of my Gmail accounts. I swear Google texts me more than humans.
“So secure, even you can’t access your account.”
Eh? I use Yahoo (well, att.net via Yahoo), and I have no problem bookmarking directly to the main inbox page.
I’m so glad Microsoft didn’t spend billions of dollars to buy Yahoo a few years back. That was Ballmer’s most unbelievable initiative.
Gmail doesn’t do this? Hell, I got so annoyed by those messages that I did link my phone number to my account, only to then have it start asking me to link a second phone number to the account. And boy am I glad I linked my number, because now I get to go through the whole authorization process with every device and browser I use, for both of my Gmail accounts. I swear Google texts me more than humans.
I get the annoyance, but surely this is WAD. The whole point of two factor authentication is to make you go through the whole process with every device and browser.
Hey! Give these people a little more credit! They know that (re)installing a browser toolbar is the only way to change the home page.
Nice line from Matt Levine on what exactly Yahoo’s core business is:
the whole point of Yahoo as a company right now is to not pay taxes on Alibaba. I realize that seems a bit hyperbolic, but just look at those numbers. Those Alibaba taxes are worth at least two and a half times the value of Yahoo’s entire business. If there was a way to avoid paying taxes on the Alibaba shares that involved burning all of Yahoo’s actual businesses to the ground, Yahoo should do that all day long, and then do it again the next day. It would still add shareholder value.