Yahoo brickhouse in the doghouse

CHALK ANOTHER one up to the economic meltdown. Sorry, did we say meltdown? Obviously there is no meltdown since Gordon Brown has already saved the world. In which case, chalk another one up to Jerry Yang being a grade A imbecile when it comes to running his company.

Although, since Yang isn't actually running his company any more, chalk another one up to a disastrous leadership void at Yahoo. Regardless, the simple fact is that Yahoo is closing its Brickhouse development lab and chucking out the people along with it.

Brickhouse was originally conceived by Yahoo as a separate product development group where 'cool' stuff could be built away from the corporate culture of the company, thus bringing to market products that Yahoo would otherwise eschew. It was built on the back of Caterina Fake, founder of Flickr that was acquired by Yang & Co, whose web 2.0 nouse was supposed to usher in a new wave of product innovation.

And, indeed, the team launched some surprisingly good products. Yahoo Pipes was a revolutionary way of constructing and reconstructing feeds with a WYSIWYG editor, critically acclaimed for its genuine technical prowess. Yahoo Live was a solid live-streaming video product that could have gained significant traction given the core Yahoo audience. Fire Eagle was an interesting platform for sharing location data that could have become an industry standard with the right effort.

Unfortunately, whilst the Brickhouse team worked hard and developed cool stuff, the core of Yahoo was falling apart so fast and so catastrophically that absolutely zero effort was put into marketing those products or even doing anything to promote their use beyond a cursory release. This led to the departure of Ms Fake, then Chad Dickerson, her successor, thus ensuring that the lack of continuity ruined any chance of further success.

With the current crisis at Yahoo leading to a huge problem with its search and advertising businesses, not to mention the continuing threat of a Microsoft buy-out and the credit crisis roiling the economy, it seems that genuine technical product innovation and revenue generating growth potential are luxuries that Yahoo can't really afford at the moment. µ

L'Inq
Techcrunch