"While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive."
I don't get how notepad, address book, calendar etc are part of yahoo's strategy and bookmarks aren't.
That quote strikes me as incredibly tone deaf. Not just the corporate speak of 'resourced' after laying off the team, but the utter lack of vision they have for the product. Delicious defined a category of webservices (public bookmarking) but to their eyes they aren't 'competitive'.
Yeah it's really terrible. The part about "we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo" is laughable. I understand they can't just be honest and say "we don't know how to use it", but the way they phrased it conveys a sort of hubris that a company as poorly run as Yahoo should stay far far away from.
Their Strategy Department is found to the right of the Office of Public Relations which is down the hall from their Search Engine HQ and their Research Lab for Unicorn Care.
Notepad, Address Book and Calendar are already tightly integrated into My Yahoo, which is what the current Yahoo homepage was originally derived from. Delicious was always an outsider in comparison.
Because of that tight integration, I guess those features are tended to be used by certain coveted audiences of the My Yahoo product - like people monitoring their stock portfolios using My Yahoo. So there's enough of an ad-happy audience using those features to make componentising these features - perhaps as YAP modules - throughout the range of Yahoo sites.
Though, as I understood it, Yahoo notepad hasn't had any tender loving care for years (it was something I was interested in redeveloping during my time at Yahoo). It's not much more than a persistent textarea (unlike the defunct Google notebook that had far richer structure)
I don't get how notepad, address book, calendar etc are part of yahoo's strategy and bookmarks aren't.