Yahoo arrives 24 hours late to its own wake

Update: 24 hours after the news broke that it was shutting Delicious, Yahoo announces a plan to sell it instead. Three things wrong here. First, managing a public company really takes a bit more than just swaying in the wind of popular opinion. If you decide to close a business unit you should have a reason, not just fold when people tell you it's a bad idea. Second...24 hours? From what was once a web-publishing and news company? Hollow laughter. And third - selling it still leaves Yahoo without a strategy. Combining Yahoo Local with Flickr, Delicious and Upcoming would have made a great (world class) local news and content destination and potentially given Yahoo's disparate properties some overall purpose and direction. Now they'll maybe have a second-rate local news site and the same old portfolio of unconnected web properties, minus some of the better bits. This story looks like it's pretty much over. Bye Yahoo.   

Original post: So I outsourced some of my memory yo Yahoo in the form of delicious, and now Yahoo is shutting it down. "Like setting a museum on fire", says Marshall at RWW. Another lesson in the dangers of keeping things in that ever-so-fluffy-sounding "cloud", which - as we saw with Amazon and Wikileaks - actually just means "on computers that belong to some company who can do pretty much what it likes with them".

You know what delicious was really good for? Organising the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Yahoo's shutting delicious because it doesn't understand its value. Time for someone who does to make them an offer, Mountain View?

A memo from Yahoo claims the move is about "cutting our investment in underperforming or off-strategy products". Bad news there guys - we all know you don't have anything as grandiose as a strategy for the things you're not shuttering this week.