Yahoo Kills Flipboard Competitor Six Months After Debut 72
redletterdave writes "It seemed like a step in the right direction for Yahoo back in November, when the company announced a family of new mobile products that would enrich the way users experience and understand their news and entertainment content. But just shy of seven months after that outburst of mobile and social apps and tools, Yahoo has decided to call it quits on arguably the biggest piece of that mobile package: the personalized magazine app for iPad, Livestand. This was the first major business decision made by Ross Levinsohn, the interim CEO who took over for Scott Thompson on May 13 after the SEC discovered Thompson lied on his resume."
Lie? (Score:0, Interesting)
The "lie" was a minor or emphasis at his school. I went to a Cal State university and the counselor stated I should emphasize or minor in sub-disciplines, which I did as requested. When I went to have it perfected onto my degree there was no process or procedure to do it. The University lied outright. It wasn't me, it was them.
JJ
Too bad, it was a good app (Score:3, Interesting)
I like Livestand. It's a richer interface than the one-dimensional approach of the classic browser news portal. I wonder if it was costing them too much money to maintain, or not enough ad revenue, or no revenue at all. That part was never clear to me; paging through the app, I don't see much in the way of ads.
I wonder what's happening to Yahoo these days; they seem not to have a clue since about 2003 or so. They were a great portal back in the '90s and I still have them bookmarked for news and weather, and my wife uses their email. They have so much potential; something isn't adding up.
Re:CEO has to mark his Territory (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder if you actually tried the app.
As I recall, it is so slow as to be unusable on my iPad (original model) and crashes frequently.
It deserves to die.
The Android Yahoo app is also slow on my Samsung Galaxy tab 10.1, mostly because of the new heavy banner advertisement they force you to load before each and every story. And there is really no reason for anyone to use it, when there are so many free alternatives that have smaller and less intrusive ads and that are getting far better ratings overall in the Android Market/Google Play Store.
They don't need to kill their apps. They just need to kill their current mobile advertising network, and purchase an existing one (or copy the features of an existing one) that doesn't try to kill the user experience trying to squeeze out every single penny out of our eye balls (and cell phone batteries).