I agree that many of their purchases have not fared well in the end. It is almost an embrace and extinguish plan, but only the most popular services survive like Flickr and Delicious.

The disappointing part of this is the amount of interesting work appearing in the search and social spaces at Yahoo. We will probably see Yahoo focus purely on being a content portal and only continue with whatever properties are still successful.

One need only Google “Flickr” and “censorship” to see what a wonderful job they’ve done in managing one of the Internet’s treasures, and Flickr has been lucky. Geocities and Jumpcut are gone. Of its own homegrown services, Yahoo has shut down Mash, before anybody even knew what it was supposed to be, Live (video feed service) before almost anybody had heard of it, Yahoo 360 – their blogging service – after managing to generate a panic and killing off its once considerable popularity, Briefcase, Photos, Auctions … and many more, I’m sure.

It wastes its stockholder’s money on acquiring companies only to destroy them, while providing an overwhelmingly negative net social benefit to the online community, by creating a strong deterrent against putting real work into building a creative presence on any smaller site, because who knows what Yahoo’s next acquisition will be? Anybody who took this company out of the picture would be doing a great social service.

Gates – paging Bill Gates?

I would love to take credit for breaking this, but it comes from ReadWriteWeb which I did link to. The fact that you read it here first makes me happy though

They definitely do not make you feel confident that anything but their content properties will continue. Yahoo has had a serious lack of execution the past few years, and that can be seen in a comparison of what they offered three years and now. Many of their services have not really changed.