JitNik's Tech World

Bad news seems to be flowing in for Yahoo users constantly. Yahoo recently shut down many services like Yahoo 360, Yahoo Geocities and Yahoo Jumpcut and now its time for Yahoo Gallery.

Yahoo Gallery is scheduled to be butchered on 14 July 2009. This service was used to showcase applications that were using Yahoo technologies like Yahoo OpenId service,Yahoo search,delicious etc. Yahoo Gallery was still in Beta stage and it never jumped into the market with the alpha version.



With the recent butchering of many services in beta stage, meaning of the term “beta” seems changing. Beta Software generally means that it is not a full production version and is still in development phase having some bugs. Beta stage is changing to somewhat like “The service provider may not have enough confidence on the service , they may also shut down the service without a decent notice as they are not sure how to monetize the service or don’t have enough funds to keep the service running”.

The recent closure of beta services brings another alarming question in mind “Most of Google services are in Beta, can they shut them down” . Google has already shut down many services which were in beta stage in early 2009. Can users live without Gmail,Google reader,Google docs is a big question as a downtime of only 18 minutes affected 5% of the internet how will discontinuation of services like Gmail, Google reader affect the world.

Why are providers like Yahoo, Google killing services:

Providers like Yahoo and Google are shutting down services one after another , How can one trust whether services which are now part and parcel of one’s life will survive long enough:

I can think of couple of reasons which led to shutdown of various services:

Recession - Everybody has to cut costs so they need to shut some things down.
Bad decision to start the service in the first place - Providers were not able to judge the market and requirements clearly and there was no clear path how the services will monetize hence they were killed as they never lead to any profits.
Whatever may be the reason of shutdown, one thing is clear providers need to think deeply before starting a service in the first place otherwise they will keep loosing confidence of the users denting their reputation in the long term.