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Yahoo in the News: Committing brand seppukku and Hooray for Flickr

Wow - this morning was an eye opener.

Yahoo is shutting down Yahoo Photos in to focus on Flickr. Yahoo’s gotten cut on repeatedly for having massive overlap and redundancy in its offerings, causing brand confusion, and diluting the value proposition of each; perhaps they’re finally starting to act on the Peanut Butter Manifesto or whatever it was. Question: Is it a good idea?

I have to say: It seems bizarre. Yahoo has a massive installed user base with Yahoo Photos. To shut that down - instead of (as Danny suggests) just maintaining it and focusing investment on Flickr, seems bizarre. Add in the “user export” options and its becomes a macabre version of service suicide.

Why force members out into the cold? Why not gradually transition them over time by making it easy and advantageous to switch to Flickr? This move means nothing to Flickr users, and will piss of Yahoo Photos users, so what’s the upside here from a user standpoint? Nothing, as far as I can see. Yahoo needs to put users back into their business decisions.

While I applaud service openness and the ability to export photos to competitors is clearly designed to create warm & fuzzies, it just seems misplaced. Is Yahoo Photos hemmoraghing cash or something? I wonder if there’s more backstory to this.

Scobleizer tells us how Arrignton posted the news from a dinner (cool).
Mathew Ingram wraps up comments to the effect that the move may backfire given that Yahoo Photos hosts 2 billion pictures, and that Flickr uses a paid premium membership model.
Danny Sullivan focuses on the fact that Yahoo will offer to transition users to other services other than Flickr, and wonders what the hell Yahoo is doing disassembling a successful service and shunting users elsewhere.

EDIT: Zoli has a great summation of the Peanut Butter manifesto context:

A key idea in Brad Garlinghouse’s Peanut Butter Manifesto was to eliminate redundancy within Yahoo, kill overlapping products that compete with each other. Yesterday Mr. Peanut-Butter himself, along with Flickr Co-Founder Stewart Butterfield broke the news to TechCrunch: Yahoo will shut down Photos, in favor of Flickr.

flickr, techcrunch yahoo

2 Responses to “Yahoo in the News: Committing brand seppukku and Hooray for Flickr”

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