Yahoo Closing their Auctions Service

I read this news first on news.com.com. I'm surprised this isn't considered big news: it's not on TechCrunch, news.google etc. A major #2 player in a major industry (eBay is a $6B company) has thrown in the towel. Much bigger news than Google Answers closing shop IMO.

We should also discuss failures like this on news.YC: there's as much to learn from them as from successes. Yahoo had a good product, brand, etc. but just couldn't compete with eBay's network effect. eBay had a huge first-mover advantage.

Luckily for Yahoo, Yahoo was the first mover in Japan, and it has much larger market share than eBay there.