Yahoo! is a company who has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons the past few weeks after it hired a CEO who lied on his resume. After dealing with that fiasco, the company has a new strategy to stem the losses it has been incurring, create a new web browser.
Yes, Yahoo! is building a browser (called Axis) and it will be shown off really soon, as soon as tonight possibly if the source material is correct. An email was sent out, not that long ago, that outlines the strategy. Launch.co got their hands on it and you read the entire letter here; pasted below is an excerpt from that memo:
Smarter, Faster Search with Rich Design: Get instant answers and visual previews so you can continuously discover and explore content without interruption. Never leave the page you are on to view your search results again.
Connected Experience: Move seamlessly across devices, picking up wherever you left off as you move across your desktop, iPhone, and iPad. Recently visited sites, searches, saved articles, and bookmarks are automatically accessible across all your devices.
Personal Home Page: Get direct access to your favorite sites and content across all your devices with the customizable Home Page.
While we hesitate to judge a product before we have used it, we really must wonder if this is the correct direction for the company to go down? The browser market is already jammed with competitors from Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Apple, Opera, all of which have tons of cash to burn, unlike Yahoo!.
It’s hard to take this approach seriously as the company seems to be missing the point, it is not the browser that is keeping people away from Yahoo!, its their content and services. By introducing a new browser, they are not fixing the real issue.
The email points users to axis.yahoo.com that contains a video that will “wow, and woo, searchers”, we wish we could say we made that line up.
[Update] Even better, Yahoo! called this a browser in the letter they sent out but as the readers pointed out below, it is really only a plug-in.