Sounds like an opportunity for someone to buy yahoo messenger, make it work the way the oil industry wants it, and sell it to them as an industry specific chat service. No need to bring the rest of Yahoo along for the ride.
When an industry is so reliant on one service, it's very difficult to shift an entire industry to a new platform. Segmentation is a real thing.<p>A good example I'm familiar with is within electronic sports (competitive video-games): almost every executive, player, personality, etc has been using Skype since ~2010. Unfortunately, Skype has a large number of security vulnerabilities and users can be subjected by DDOS attacks- which is especially important if such an attack impacts their performance in a game, or interrupts a livestream. Even though there are, arguably, better products being created that serve the same purpose as Skype and that don't fall victim to this problem (Discord, Slack), those within the industry don't want to segment themselves from everyone else.
Doesn't this article feel like it was written for Yahoo's benefit? Since they have a blinded bidding process (See [1]), it seems as if this article could help drum up higher bids. Maybe Yahoo is the anonymous source that provided the "hot tip" about commodity traders on Yahoo Messenger.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-20/yahoo-bids-and-stock-lending" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-20/yahoo-bid...</a>
> In Geneva, the epicenter of Switzerland’s $21 billion commodity-trading industry, accounting for about one-third of the world’s daily oil transactions<p>That's pretty impressive for a country that has never even been visited by an oil tanker.
It sounds like Yahoo has wasted one opportunity after another.<p>Yahoo clearly did not know why the oil industry is using Yahoo Messenger. Instead of doubling down and building a product for that market, they build a replacement product that's going to be detached from the needs of its users.
I know someone in the oil industry and was surprised by this as well, but it is absolutely true. They really do use Yahoo a lot.<p>When I asked why they haven't switched, I was given a response similar to what the articles says, "that all regulatory and internal controls are addressed"<p>I believe natural gas communication is still done by AIM a lot.
A lot of big tech companies also use Yahoo chat. Salesforce did as late as 2012 when I left, with 1k+ people in the eng org. (No idea if they still do).<p>Seemed crazy at the same, still does now too
They should start using XMPP/Jabber. At the beginning with a Yahoo-Transport to be compatible with the people that are slower to switch:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP#Connecting_to_other_protocols" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP#Connecting_to_other_proto...</a>
One thing Yahoo has is an excellent university recruiting program with bombastic pampering, puzzle challenges, and hackathons. Seeing what other companies also have extremely hyped up university recruitment programs, I almost treat it now as a negative signal for a company's future success. I suppose the harder you have to try to win graduates' hearts, the less appealing you are to work for, and consequently, the worse off of a company you are going to be without the right kind of talent on staff going forward.
The oil traders could move to WhatsApp or somesuch but I'd be kind of sad if they went. The other day I was trying to get free historical stock data via an API and Yahoo Finance was about the only thing that did it ok.<p>Yahoo could assure their financial future by going massively long oil futures and then putting out false messages about Saudi Arabia having been nuked by ISIS or some such. A tad illegal perhaps but an offshoot in some ill policed part of the world could do it.
This article seems ridiculous both because Yahoo messenger isn't going anywhere. And if it did, moving to another service would be a small hiccup.