Last night at dinner, my friends and I were talking about Carol Bartz being ousted as Yahoo!’s CEO. A beautiful girl asked, “What does Yahoo! even do anymore?” What a great question! At its best, Yahoo! was known for search, email, chat, and a groundbreaking videogame show. After numerous identity crises, its most recent focus has been content creation and distribution. The thing is, in almost every area Yahoo! competes in, someone is doing it better (in most cases, a lot better).
Yahoo!’s former core competencies have been lapped by Google, AOL, Microsoft, Skype, etc. The company did a marvelous job at stagnating Flickr, formerly my favorite photo service. As a content creator, the company is terribly inconsistent and often pumps out weak products. I’ve gone from using several Yahoo! products on a daily basis to hopping on Yahoo! Messenger every now and then. The only reason I even do that is because a lot of my friends in Asia still prefer it over other chat programs.
How about you guys and gals? To paraphrase one of the company’s most popular slogans, “Do you still Yahoo!” Were you a heavy Yahoo! user in the past? What Yahoo! products do you still use today?
I still have a Yahoo email account that I use for junk, but I still check it.
I only recently used Yahoo! for the first time for fantasy sports. I log in with my Google account. Before that was Hotmail, which I still check on occasion.
I've been using Yahoo almost exclusively for fantasy sports non-stop for the past 11 years. It's the best one out there in my opinion. The mobile apps suck, but other than that, it is top notch. Between fantasy baseball and fantasy football, I actually go on Yahoo almost every day. It’s my second-most visited site I go to next to this one.
While I'm there, I read some articles and maybe play a few web games. I used to play the poker game a lot when I was learning how to play. I love the (non-profit) online poker
They should bring back a certain ground-breaking video game show with a generic, pretty-eyed blonde-haired chick and a token Asian.
-M
That point was actually brought up last night. Fantasy sports is one of the few things that Yahoo! still does well.
yahoo is still my homepage…HA!
I have never used anything Yahoo. I am pretty sure I have only been to their site accidentally.
We have a Yahoo! Baking Company a mile or so down the road…..never been there either.
I actually only use Yahoo for fantasy sports, but not because I think it is the best, only because that's what everyone uses (I still prefer ESPN FF). My friends who still Yahoo on a daily basis get made fun of (by me) because there are so many other options IMO for what they do. Also IMO there should be no email other than gmail—they simply are so much better than anything else I have ever come in contact with. Friends of mine use Yahoo for news, and they claim it as a "one stop website" but if you only use a site for one purpose then it will always be a one stop website for that use.
Honestly if the consensus is that Yahoo does fantasy sports really well, then I will loudly disagree. There is much less information given on Yahoo than ESPN, the layout of the site feels outdated versus ESPN's edgier feeling layout and graphics, and Yahoo is also slower in comparison.