Yahoo is continuing to expand its outsourcing. Under former CEO's Carol Bartz leadership, Yahoo moved to get rid of as many businesses and products as possible. The ones that it kept it oursourced to outside companies.
The biggest such move was its search deal with Microsoft. Bing is now powering Yahoo Search around the world, though the results of that aren't particularly great.
Now it's moving forward with the outsourcing of another of its major products, Maps. Yahoo Maps is now powered by Nokia Maps in the US and Canada.
The switch was made quietly and quite a long time after it was announced, almost a year and a half. But Yahoo has finally done it, visit maps.yahoo.com and you'll notice the Nokia logo in the corner.
Last year, Yahoo was more optimistic about the move, it said that some components will go live in 2010, while the rest in 2011. But it's taken so far to start the maps integration.
"Today we are excited to announce a worldwide strategic alliance between Yahoo! and Nokia to extend the reach of our industry leading online services and offer people rich experiences that keep them connected to their world and the world around them," Yahoo
announced last year.
"Nokia will be the exclusive, global provider of Yahoo!’s maps and navigation services, integrating Ovi Maps across Yahoo! properties, branded as 'powered by Ovi'," it said.
Of course, at the time, Nokia Maps was called Ovi Maps, but the company dropped the Ovi brand earlier this year. There are also rumors that Nokia will provide mapping services to Bing as well.
With these two moves, Nokia became a big player in online mapping, challenging Google for global dominance. But just as the Yahoo Search - Bing deal didn't really pan out as everyone hoped, there's no guarantee that with market share comes success.
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