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Yahoo hints that Microsoft is to blame for poor financial results
AILING INTERNET PORTAL Yahoo has hinted that its partnership with Microsoft is partly to blame for a 24 per cent drop in revenue and a 28 per cent fall in net profit.
Yahoo brought in $1.2 billion (£733 million) in revenue for the first three months of the year, nearly a quarter drop from the same period last year, while net profit came in at $223 million (£136 million), well short of the $310 million (£189 million) it earned last year.
Yahoo's CEO, Carol Bartz indicated that revenue won't increase to the level it was before the Microsoft deal until the end of the year, according to the BBC, suggesting that the partnership might have had an adverse effect on the company's financial results.
Yahoo teamed up with Microsoft last year to power web searches with Microsoft's Bing search engine, an effort to steal back lost market share from rival Google.
Now that partnership is effectively on hold, with Yahoo saying that it has so far failed to pay off.
In many ways, however, the problem boils down to Yahoo itself, which Bartz has been attempting to rescue over the past two years.
Yahoo has seen such a sharp drop in revenue and profits this year partly because it received a capital injection from Microsoft last year as part of their deal. Without a similar influx of cash, Yahoo has to go it alone - and that doesn't seem to be getting it very far.
Despite the declines, the company still brought in more revenue than analysts expected, leading to a 3.5 per cent increase in share value. Bartz attempted to capitalise on this by suggesting that the company's turnaround is still "on schedule" and "heading in the right direction".
However The INQUIRER doesn't think that 'down' is really the right direction at all. µ
Tags: Internet
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Despite all Carol Bartz' "turnaround is on schedule" and "heading in the right direction", actually Yahoo has been pouring its own energy into destroying itself for many years now, and is accelerating recently.
I am sad when remembering ~1994 (when Yahoo with its invention of the "portal" made an instant huge world wide success by providing A LOT of INFORMATION in a MINIMUM of bandwidth, page space, reading time), then the years when Yahoo was my POP email service, Search (even before they turned to AltaVista then to that new unknown little "Google"), my News roster, my discussion home, maps, finances, weather, everything.
Then not only did they never cure the flaws, instead they aggravated them, and added new ones; they constantly added load on their pages and hid the most important things behind bells and whistles, defeating the very value of Yahoo. Too bad, they were the best for News (wide flow of accurate and timely news, presented in light yet clear and pleasant pages), for Discussions (fast, convenient, huge volume, very educated members), Maps, webmail. Unfortunately each of these marvels was killed by one or two big internal flaws: they always kept email subscribing open (instead of controlled with identity, as amazon, laposte.net, and myriads others are doing), thus making their discussions overwhelmed by hooligans hidden behind anonymous nicknames, which KILLED Yahoo discussions; they don't keep News online long enough, thus killing their News; etc, etc, until today: it's now their webmail, the last yahoo service that remained the best on the web, that just recently got an "upgrade" that instantly brings it a couple levels BELOW all the competitors.
And that is not the end... not yet. Like any company that starts listening to marketers and gurus more than to users, Yahoo is doomed.
Versailles, Thu 21 Apr 2011 15:16:00 +0200