Corporate Acquisitions

Revisiting 'What Is Yahoo?' - Local Edition

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In Brief...

I wrote yesterday about Yahoo's (YHOO) new (beta) hyperlocal websites - currently live in a few dozen US neighborhoods but with big plans to expand to a footprint of 400,000 contributors. In fact, hyperlocal makes genuinely intelligent use of Yahoo's notoriously diverse portfolio of acquisitions, and there is the potential - perhaps for the very first time - to actually tie together a lot of Yahoo's bolt-on acquisitions as part of a coherent strategy.. The original local content may well be the killer feature across these sites, but it's far from being the only hyperlocal asset that Yahoo has brought to bear.. Let's not kid ourselves that all those random $100 million buys along the way were part of a coherent strategy that would one day give Yahoo an absolutely killer hyperlocal portfolio... Some of these are unquestionably market leaders (Flickr is perhaps the cause celebre, and Yahoo's own Answers product kicked Google (GOOG) out of the ring back in 2006); some, while facing major new challenges, are still solid cash-cow legacy businesses (Yahoo mail, Yahoo Finance); and many are bolt-on acquisitions that have never hitherto fit into any sort of broader strategy (Upcoming, Delicious).

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