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Yahoo Watching

I am not a big Yahoo user but have been following the site and the news about Yahoo since Marissa Mayer took over. Mainly I am curious about how this thing will end up under her stewardship and when the souring happens  how the blame will be apportioned. The Tumblr deal did not make a lot of sense - instead of clarifying a brand which is already all over the map, Mayer chose to thrown something new in the mix. I tend to agree with Owen Thomas on why this is a mistake. 

If teens are turning away from Facebook because they want to get away from their parents, any kind of Yahoo-fication of Tumblr will not go over well with this population. Yet letting Tumblr function autonomously making the change of guard seamless to its user population would not meet Yahoo's goals. Yahoo is way more old school than Facebook and ever so uncool. The clutter on the landing page is out of control and has a disturbing Geocities vibe about it. It makes me want to run right away to some place quieter where the content has some focus.  I love Hulu and have been a user from their earliest days. Specially sad to see Yahoo bidding to acquire it as well. Still remember the time when I had to give up my favorite bookmarking site del.icio.us and how Yahoo took my some thousand Flickr images hostage and would only let me see a few for free - so many bad memories. It's good to see the sadness is shared

 Sad but true: there’s a long history of Yahoo making companies it buys uncool, rather than acquisitions making Yahoo cool.

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