Since Terry Semel left the CEO seat at Yahoo! (YHOO) the stock is down over 10% and recently that number was closer to 20%.
Yahoo! announced today that it has paid $350 million to buy Zembra, an open source e-mail and calendar company. Now it can compete with Google (GOOG) Apps and Microsoft (MSFT) Office. Like going after an elephant with a water pistol.
Yahoo! has also announced that it will start a social network called Mash. There are only about 1,000 companies in that business, lead by MySpace and Facebook.
Yahoo! also just bought a news-aggregation Web site called BuzzTracker. And, the company is selling display ads for UK-based social network Bebo. Display advertising is not growing very fast anymore, especially compared to the kind of search-based ads they do so well over at Google (GOOG).
If there does not seem to be a pattern here, it is because there is not one. Yahoo! is throwing sh-t at the wall and hopes that some of it will stick. Any other explanation is beyond what the human mind can comprehend.
Douglas A. McIntyre
