Just seven months after introducing it, Yahoo has announced it is discontinuing Livestand, its personalized magazine aggregation Flipboard-clone iPad app. Even though the app got plenty of good reviews, averaging a 4-star rating in the app store, Yahoo said “it had previously committed itself to shelf (sic) what’s not working” including a number of other mobile apps it killed off in January.
Yahoo has been trying to pivot its business lately, laying over 2,000 employees—almost 14% of its workforce—last month. And more recently CEO Scott Thompson was booted for lying on his résumé, making interim CEO Ross Levinsohn the fourth person to hold Yahoo’s CEO title since last September. One commenter on Slashdot posited that the decision to drop Livestand was classic “territory marking,” with the new guy wanting to do something highly visible to show that he was doing something, even if what he ended up doing was not the right thing.
On the other hand, I can’t say that I’d ever heard much about Livestand, so I don’t know that it was in any position to set the world on fire. And Flipboard does what Flipboard does so well that it seems hard to imagine there’s much room for a competitor in the arena.
(Found via Slashdot.)
