Yahoo is poised to shut down a few of its long-running services in June 2015 and beyond, including Yahoo Maps.
The eight-year old Maps service, once a popular product, has faded into obscurity with the rise of a rival product, Google Maps. And with Microsoft and Apple working on their own competing maps products, it has been difficult to Yahoo to get traction on its own maps product.
The moves indicate that CEO Marissa Mayer is really trying to focus on content to improve Yahoo’s revenue and bottom line.
Yahoo is also making changes to some other products as part of its 2015 “spring cleaning” - a term used to refer to tech giants’ closing down of products that are of little perceived value to them. It will close down a few country specific versions of Yahoo Music, Movies, TV, Autos and Entertainment.
Yahoo is also shutting down Yahoo Pipes, a geeky user interface that allowed non-programmers to write programs that could consume and process various Internet feeds in RSS and other formats.
“At Yahoo, we continue to focus on our key product pillars: search, communications and digital content,” Yahoo Chief Architect Amotz Maimon wrote in a blog post. “Part of that focus includes taking a hard look at our existing products and services, and ensuring our resources are spent smartly and with a clear purpose.”
Full details of the product closures were in the Tumblr blog post by Maimon.
