{"id":576824,"date":"2010-05-24T16:29:14","date_gmt":"2010-05-24T20:29:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=121901"},"modified":"2010-05-24T16:29:14","modified_gmt":"2010-05-24T20:29:14","slug":"yahoo%e2%80%99s-new-core-competency-seems-to-be-outsourcing-to-others","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/576824","title":{"rendered":"Yahoo\u2019s New Core Competency Seems to Be Outsourcing to Others"},"content":{"rendered":"

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After more than a year of looking at Yahoo’s operations, CEO Carol Bartz seems to have settled on a new business model — namely, outsourcing various parts of the company’s sprawling web empire to other companies. Today saw two similar announcements: one has online-dating site Match.com taking over<\/a> Yahoo’s personal classifieds service, and the second has mobile giant Nokia assuming command of a joint venture<\/a> involving the web company’s mobile email, chat and mapping services. In similar moves made earlier this year, Yahoo merged much of the operation<\/a> of its health site with Healthline Networks and management of its online shopping service was effectively handed over to<\/a> PriceGrabber.<\/p>\n

In the Match.com pairing — the value of which wasn’t disclosed by the companies — users of Yahoo’s personals site will gradually be transitioned to something called “Match.com on Yahoo.” The web service had been expected by some to sell the personals business outright, with analysts giving the unit<\/a> an estimated value of $500 million. In the Nokia deal, meanwhile, the Finland-based mobile handset company will provide its mobile mapping technology for use in all of Yahoo’s services, while Yahoo’s email and chat will become the engine behind Nokia’s new Ovi email and chat features.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, outsourcing and partnering with others around some of its business units makes sense for Yahoo, where Bartz has been trying hard to rationalize its sprawling empire by cutting costs and improving its return on investment. At the same time, however, many of these deals seem to fall into the category of “too little, too late,” as Kevin noted in his analysis of the Nokia deal<\/a>. Like the company’s most substantial outsourcing attempt of all — the multibillion-dollar deal with Microsoft to partner on search<\/a> — they seem to be an admission that Yahoo has failed to make much of these businesses on its own, and is satisfied to simply take a small share of someone else’s business in return.<\/p>\n