Yahoo! culls web products, including Delicious and AltaVista

17 Dec 2010

Just hours after announcing 600 job cuts worldwide, Yahoo! is to shut down several online business units, inlcuding Delicious, MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Picks, AltaVista, Yahoo! Bookmarks and Yahoo! Buzz.

Yahoo! plans to sunset these products, merge products like Yahoo! Events, FireEagle and Sideline and strongly push and feature products like Yahoo! Calendar, Deals, Widgets, Alerts and Notepad.

The news was presented to Yahoo!’s employees via a webcast and slideshow and no doubt found its way onto the web. MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier posted the slide on Twitter.

An incensed Yahoo! product manager Blake Irving has threatened to fire whoever leaked the slide (below).

Yahoo! streamlines

In a statement that pretty much confirms the matter Yahoo! said: “Part of our organisational streamlining involves cutting our investment in under performing or off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation in the next year and beyond.

“We continuously evaluate and prioritise our portfolio of products and services, and do plan to shut down some products in the coming months such as Yahoo! Buzz, our Traffic APIs, and others. We will communicate specific plans when appropriate,” the company said.

Yahoo! in October delivered a US$189m profit on third-quarter revenues of US$1.6bn for its third quarter. The profit – up 107pc on last year – was helped by the sale of HotJobs.

Yahoo slide

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com