Yahoo closes $7.6 billion deal with Alibaba Group

But I am very interested in tech, and looking at Yahoo! in a broad sense I think they need to shift their focus from short term profits to making their core offerings a)more functional for their users, b)more beautiful for their users, and c)integrated with the other services and platforms their users use.

I mean, look at their search page. It is literally slathered in adds and links to...god only knows what. Seemingly random news articles? Buttons that say "OMG!" (where will that take me, I wonder?), auto-site links, and hilariously, a 'Trending' section. I almost want to cry.

Now think about a search customer navigating to Yahoo! to perform a search, -that's all they want to do. And they see this.

Same goes for their mail product. You have users that you are serving, but what you are offering them is just as comically abysmal. It's offensive. It's information overload. It looks like shit.

They are, as a company, in a position to better offer some core services like search, mail, photo storage and sharing to an incredibly large audience in a beautiful, user experience enhancing way. I'd love to see them seize that opportunity instead of just slathering their products with garbage to chase short term ad revenue (destroying the user experience in the process and driving people away in the long term), or failing completely to nurture and exploit their better properties like Flickr.

Yahoo! needs to get back to basics and fix those things before it starts moving on to grander ambitions imho. They do that, and users will appreciate it. They will stay with them. New users will come into the fold. Stem the flow of users leaving their properties, bring new users in with core service enhancements, then leverage that audience as they expand into areas of what amounts to pure speculation.