Yahoo trims product lineup as CEO Marissa Mayer sharpens mobile focus
“Yahoo! Inc. is shuttering a few of its online services, including a coupon site and a local events calendar, as Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer sharpens the Web portal’s focus on applications for mobile devices,” Douglas MacMillan reports for Bloomberg. “Yahoo! Deals and Upcoming will shut down April 30, the Sunnyvale, California-based company said in a blog post today. Yahoo! Kids will close the same day, along with its SMS update service and older versions of its e-mail and messenger apps.”
“The company wants to trim its 60 to 75 products to about a dozen to offer popular mobile apps, Mayer said at an investor conference in February.,” MacMillan reports. “Earlier this week, Yahoo unveiled an e-mail app for [iPad, iPad mini, and also-ran tablets] that lets users manage their inbox by swiping messages into groups organized by sender, as well as a new program for checking weather forecasts on smartphones [Yahoo! Weather]. In March, Yahoo said it would end products including an app for BlackBerry devices, Yahoo! App Search and Yahoo! Message Boards.”
MacMillan reports, “The company grew to more than 300 million monthly mobile users in the first quarter, from 200 million at the end of 2012.”
MacDailyNews Take: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)Marissa Mayer is taking a page from Steve Jobs’ playbook. Smart and hot is a deadly combination.
When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, it was producing a random array of computers and peripherals, including a dozen different versions of the Macintosh. After a few weeks of product review sessions, he’d finally had enough. “Stop!” he shouted. “This is crazy.” He grabbed a Magic Marker, padded in his bare feet to a whiteboard, and drew a two-by-two grid. “Here’s what we need,” he declared. Atop the two columns, he wrote “Consumer” and “Pro.” He labeled the two rows “Desktop” and “Portable.” Their job, he told his team members, was to focus on four great products, one for each quadrant. All other products should be canceled. There was a stunned silence. But by getting Apple to focus on making just four computers, he saved the company. “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” he told me. “That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.” – Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great. ― Steve Jobs’ 2011 advice to Google’s Larry Page via Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs
