This is what happens after a series of bumbling owners fail to keep a once terrific product relevant in a dynamic market: You get a cold PR send-off that doesn't even fill the screen.
"Please visit Yahoo! Search for all of your searching needs."
That's all Yahoo wrote Friday afternoon as it lumped in the news that it was killing off AltaVista on July 8 with word that it will also ax 11 other products that no longer matter to the company.
Jay Rossiter, the vice president in charge of platforms, said the moves will free Yahoo to streamline its efforts and thus "continue to focus on creating beautiful products that are essential to you every day."
Fair enough. Yahoo needs to husband its resources and devote them to projects that matter. Truth be told, AltaVista, once the best of the bunch in the era before Internet search meant Google and three guys named Moe, has unfortunately been irrelevant for quite some time. In fact, the biggest news about its date with the guillotine may be that it was still alive after all these years. On Twitter, most folks reacted the way Mitch Kapor did when he wrote "Yahoo shutting down AltaVista. I, for one, profoundly surprised it was still alive. Ave atque vale." (That's Latin for "hail and farewell." Hey, Mitch is a Yalie, after all.)
...
Between that and Mama (which seems to have died at some point too) that was all you ever needed.
