from compete.com
I love Yahoo Finance. Even if they weren’t the first or even the best financial portal, it has been the go-to place for investors, both individual and institutional, to research stocks, industries, markets, and ETFs — for years. Many gripe that Yahoo has been slow in turning the huge ship that is Y Finance, but even with Google in the financial portal market, Yahoo has pretty much held it’s own against MSN Money as well. Anecdotally, I’m spending more and more time on Google Finance because of two reasons:
- One page format: I get most of what I need with only one click. Yahoo requires more surfing. Google doesn’t do as good job providing news and press releases.
- Basic charting function: I like Google’s basic charting function. It loads faster, doesn’t crash my browser like Yahoo’s advanced charts and tallies returns based on specific time frames that a user chooses (something Yahoo doesn’t do).
It’s with this quick backdrop that I want to discuss Yahoo’s announcement today on the Yahoo Finance blog that Yahoo Finance has gone global. While I’m no marketing whiz, the announcement is more about Yahoo getting its engineering act together than providing leading-edge financial content or data.
From the post:
Engineers, programme and product managers in eight Yahoo! offices and four time zones worked as One Yahoo! to make the vision of a Global Finance Team a reality. Until six months ago, the vast majority had never worked together or even met – but this hasn’t stopped us working as a team and delivering a great product.
While it’s a large feat launching 15 new finance pages across European countries (see sample) to supply users with the same info U.S. users have grown to rely upon, this is more about fixing Yahoo than fixing Yahoo Finance. Yahoo properties have long been plagued by a seeming lack of foresight about overall integration both at the corporate level and at the operational level. As a user, it’s clear to me that Search doesn’t share all its toys with Search Marketing nor with Hotjobs or Photos. The fact that the internal Yahoo Finance engineering team was able to plan, execute and launch a global project doesn’t really impress me (were things that bad at Yahoo?). A user expects services from a global player in this field to encompass global data and info and be accessible seamlessly.
Now that Yahoo has its engineering ducks in order, I’m kinda excited what we may see out of a Yahoo Finance team that created a groundbreaking product years ago and has made only incremental changes in all the years since.
