It’s hardly shocking to learn that Yahoo (YHOO) is shutting down its auction sites in the U.S. and Canada; you’d have to be delusional to think that Yahoo! was going to do anything to boost its measly 0.2% share of the online auction market, which is so thoroughly dominated by eBay (EBAY). (Outside North America it’s a different story, and Yahoo! plans to continue operating auctions in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan; still, let’s not kid ourselves, those sites face stiff competition and are not huge moneymakers.) The shuttering of the auction sites also follows the announcement that Yahoo! is shutting down its photo site, pointing users instead to the wonderful Flickr site that it purchased in 2005.
These overdue steps echo Yahoo! senior vice president Brad Garlinghouse’s famous Peanut Butter Manifesto from last November, in which he made the unassailable point that Yahoo! was spread too thin in too many different directions, that it lacked focus on its core businesses and in fact was competing with itself in many ways. Do investors applaud the moves? Not necessarily; YHOO stock is down more than 1% this morning, more than the market as a whole.
And for a company like Yahoo!, peanut butter remains a major temptation. Barry Ritholz makes an interesting argument that Yahoo!, more than News Corp. (NWS), would make a good acquirer for Dow Jones (DJ). I’m more or less persuaded by his strategic rationale, not at all persuaded that it would be a good use of Yahoo’s capital, at least not at the $5 billion price that Murdoch offered. Yahoo! shareholders might well feel they’d been hit with a truckload of Skippy.
-By THE FORTUNE TECHNOLOGY STAFF
These overdue steps echo Yahoo! senior vice president Brad Garlinghouse’s famous Peanut Butter Manifesto from last November, in which he made the unassailable point that Yahoo! was spread too thin in too many different directions, that it lacked focus on its core businesses and in fact was competing with itself in many ways. Do investors applaud the moves? Not necessarily; YHOO stock is down more than 1% this morning, more than the market as a whole.
And for a company like Yahoo!, peanut butter remains a major temptation. Barry Ritholz makes an interesting argument that Yahoo!, more than News Corp. (NWS), would make a good acquirer for Dow Jones (DJ). I’m more or less persuaded by his strategic rationale, not at all persuaded that it would be a good use of Yahoo’s capital, at least not at the $5 billion price that Murdoch offered. Yahoo! shareholders might well feel they’d been hit with a truckload of Skippy.
-By THE FORTUNE TECHNOLOGY STAFF