Yahoo’s new CEO Scot Thompson has a big broom in his hand, and he is using it to clean out Yahoo and shake up things back to profitability. In a call with journalists yesterday, Thompson said the company had some great properties that had a lot of potential but that there were too many other services bogging down these few profitable ones.
Referring to these redundant services, he said that Yahoo has been doing way too much for way too long and some things have to change in order to streamline and restructure the company. The first announcement made some time last week was that Yahoo was laying off some 2,000 employees as it restructures. Yesterday CEO Thompson announced that up to 50 Yahoo properties would be wound up with some being terminated altogether while others would be transitioned or folded into existing services.
This comes as no surprise as Yahoo has been known to try and get its hands into as many Internet properties as possible. Some of the services that could be axed include Yahoo Maps (ever heard of that?) and Answers, both of which have outlived their real purposes. On the other hand, Yahoo plans to concentrate on other properties that have been doing well so far including News, Sports, Mail and Finance.
Thompson says they will be concentrating on the properties that have the highest display ad potential as the main focus and dive of shutting down or transitioning services will be to allow the company to concentrate more on what is actually making money. CEO Thompson has already made his presence felt with one of his first moves on arriving at Yahoo was to file a suit against Facebook demanding they (Facebook) pay Yahoo licensing fees for patents Yahoo holds.
Thompson also has his hands full with the Yahoo/ Alibaba issue that is still hanging suspended while at the same time dealing with hostile investors. There is however some good news to all this as Yahoo has just reported an increase in revenues for the last quarter of 1%, translating into a healthy 28% profit rise.
