Yahoo!: Stop buying stuff I use and shutting them down
Another day — another start-up bought buy Yahoo!. The news is now predictably boring, the recent victim being Rockmelt. There were many before it — Stamped, Alike, Jybe, Snip.it, Ghostbird Software, Rondee and Astrid to name a few. In fact, till date Yahoo! under Marissa Mayer has made 21 acquisitions, including the blogging behemoth, Tumblr.
You can almost predict the statement on the website of the acquired company — it typically consists of the following three sentences with some variations.
Yahoo! acquires XYZ
- We are proud to announce as of today we are part of the Yahoo! family
- <Add a statement about the original vision of the company and how it aligns with Yahoo!’s vision>
- We’re really excited to join the Yahoo! team and work towards Yahoo!’s goal of “making the world’s daily habits more inspiring and entertaining.”
What is not written, but comes out shortly is the following statement:
The services of XYZ will no longer be available going forward.
Now, don’t get me wrong — I’m all for entrepreneurs and investors making a decent exit selling to Yahoo!. Heck, I myself would be more than happy to do so. But my problem is with service continuity.
Take the case of the to-do app Astrid. At the time of acquisition, Astrid had more than 4 million active users, including myself. And what does Yahoo! do after buying Astrid? Shut it down, of course! So instead of gaining 4 million users, the entire user base was lost to competitors like Wunderlist and Any.do. I was happy with Astrid and if Yahoo! had continued the service till it integrated Astrid features into its own product, I probably would have migrated to the Yahoo! service. But that was not to be.
Marissa Mayer has herself confessed that her rationale for buying most of these start-ups is not to continue the services but to get the people and technology into the folds of Yahoo!.
These companies bring sophisticated technology and intellectual property to strengthen our product portfolio and they bring great engineering and product talent to Yahoo.
But it looks like while thinking about the great technology and engineering talent, Yahoo! is forgetting one of the biggest stakeholders— the customer! Agreed, 4 million users is a drop in the ocean even compared to Yahoo! mail’s user base of 281 million. But the point is that any great company should be customer focused first. I just wish Yahoo! could be more empathetic with the existing customer base of newly acquired companies. There is nothing to lose.
