Would somebody please put Yahoo! out its misery?

Last week, I recommended a number of platforms and content managers to my students that would help them create a website where they could share articles and opinions, a kind of “home on the internet”. I reminded them that a few years ago I tended to include Wordpress, obviously, or Blogger, a reasonably simply and reasonably powerful tool, and also Tumblr, a radically simple content manager along the lines of push button publishing created by the impressive David Karp, and that for a while was attracting very large numbers of new, mainly younger, users.

Then along came Yahoo! and bought it for $1.1 billion, and as an article in Mashable called “How Yahoo! derailed Tumblr” points out, it soon reduced the company to a caricature of itself, a parody of what it once was, a company that has stopped growing and that I wouldn’t recommend to my worst enemy. In fact now I think about it, I can’t remember the last time I heard anybody mention Tumblr.

Yahoo! is a zombie: not just dead, but a creature that infects everything it touches. For Jerry Yang and David Filo, who took the simple idea of cataloging their favorite pages and turned it into what we now know as the web portal, in the process not making themselves rich but dynastically rich, it must be painful to watch the walking cadaver that is Yahoo! stumbling around and frightening people.

Yahoo!’s victims include Del.icio.us, a great social bookmarking application created by Joshua Schachter with a philosophy way ahead of its time: the company bought it, left it to rot, watched as its creator walked away in desperation, and then sold it for a song. Then there is Flickr, a photo management app created by husband and wife team Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, a star when it was born in 2004, and which again was left to wither and die on the vine, eventually prompting its creator to walk away, which was followed by an attempt to revive it under Spaniard Bernardo Hernández, who also eventually threw in the towel. And then there was Polyvore, Summly, and a long list of other failures. The absolute opposite of greatness: buying good things, scaring its creators away, and leaving them to rot…

Yahoo!’s CEO, Marissa Mayer, a former star director at Google, is the proof that nothing and nobody can breathe life into this cemetery. The company is up for sale, but the offers coming in don’t even match the cash it still has in its bank account, because in reality, nobody should go near it: the risk of infection is too great. The company has been closing down its subsidiaries, casting its employees hither and thither, watching as its talent walks away, shutting down any minimally interesting initiative, and even selling its land properties. It is beyond salvation.

Please, can we stop this interminable process of sale and closure? The company has been locked in a downward spiral for some time now, and the only thing to be done is to end things in as dignified a way possible. Will somebody please put Yahoo! out of its misery?

(En español, aquí)