This week Yahoo’s founder Jerry Yang somewhat abruptly removed himself from all things Yahoo. The net/net is that he is no longer working in the company in any capacity. There is a new CEO, Scott Thompson, who was brought in recently from PayPal (if your eyebrows raised up upon reading that, you were not alone). There is still a business intact. There is still significant traffic going to the Yahoo portal. The trouble is that there is no real Yahoo anymore. As a result, when it finally is carved up and sold off in pieces or simply starts to dwindle away, it may get to the point that we won’t even miss it.
It’s sad to say, but very true, that I won’t miss it for a moment. My Yahoo e-mail address which I have had for some 15 plus years was long ago relegated to be the junk mail collector for when I signed up for any “free” service or whatever.
While Flickr is used by so many and probably is much more fun than Google’s Picasa I don’t bother with it because most everything else I do online is connected to Google and it’s just easier when it’s all in one place (even if it’s not as cool).
Yahoo News? Yahoo Finance? These are all offerings that I can get somewhere else (dare I say Google but I don’t want the government in on the secret that Google does a lot of things well because then they might start looking into monopoly and anti-trust allegations brought up by lame Google competitors …oh wait…that’s already happening).
While I tend to be somewhat nostalgic about certain things (the way baseball used to be played by the likes of Mays, Aaron, Koufax, Yastrzemski, etc., excluding all Yankees of course 😉 ) with the Internet I could care less. Maybe this is what our fast-paced world has brought us to. Things come and go so quickly that there isn’t any time to grow attached, and the next best thing is usually a lot better, so who cares anyway?
In the end, life without Yahoo, which I think is inevitable yet sad since there is SO much it could still do to be an impact player in the Internet, won’t be much different. I will be sad to see a brand go because it had lost its way and turned up on the Internet scrap heap after it was passed around to one incompetent leader after another who was just looking to cash out. That’s a bit annoying.
I will be nostalgic for Yahoo to some degree, but I won’t miss it for even a second, quite honestly.
Boy, I sure hope that is not what people say about me when I’m gone.
