14 DAY TRIAL // Jerry Yang came to the helm of Yahoo with a clear idea of what he should accomplish and the time he has for the job. He never kept it a secret, he wanted to turn Yahoo! into the starting point for web surfers everywhere, the portal of choice for everyone, no matter if young or old. His plan slowly began unfolding, firstly with the News sections linking to outside Yahoo! space, to the major publications and even to smaller ones; after that, came the firing of about two thousand employees that probably weighed heavily and dragged down the company's level of professionalism.
CES 2008 gave Yang the opportunity to show the entire world (not that it was watching him anyway) that 2008 will be the year of a turnaround from the descendant path Yahoo! was on. He provided a preview of some of the exciting concepts that delivered upon his vision by sharing a glimpse of what his Yahoo! Mail inbox would look like. The most interesting I thought to be the demonstration of how Yahoo! opened Yahoo! Mail and incorporated widgets from both Yahoo! and from across the Internet - simply scrolling over relevant terms in an email, future users could access maps, local reviews, invitations and so on, without having to open another browser.
This means that Yahoo! Mail will also be open for third party developers who could go on a widget creating spree in order to bring happiness to hundreds of millions of users worldwide. "Yahoo! has today outlined what is possible and that the future is not that far away", said David Filo, co-founder and Chief Yahoo!. "Yahoo! is uniquely positioned to make this all a reality - we have scale, a huge community of users, great applications and APIs and insightful data. We now have an open platform for third party developers to build some interesting applications."
