Here is some interesting news for people who use Yahoo! services in Korea:
Yahoo Inc’s South Korean operation said on Friday it will quit the country, underscoring its struggle against Google Inc and local competitors expanding aggressively into mobile advertising and online services.
South Korea is the first Asian country Yahoo is leaving, the firm said. An industry pioneer and household Internet brand, it has been overshadowed by global rivals including Facebook Inc and Google in recent years.
“Yahoo has faced several challenges in the past couple of years and decided to pull out of the (Korean) business to put more resources on global business and become more powerful and successful,” Yahoo said in a statement.
Yahoo Korea, which started business in 1997 and is wholly owned by the U.S. search company, has around 200-250 employees in South Korea. It will terminate Korean online portal services in December, the company said.
In the South Korean market, it has failed to beat local rivals such as NHN Corp, Daum Communications Corp and SK Communications Co. [Reuters]
Reading the whole article I do not know if people who use Yahoo! Korea’s e-mail service will have their account deleted or not at the end of the year. It seems like it would make sense for Yahoo! just to keep those e-mail accounts operating and move it over to their US e-mail servers. If anyone knows what Yahoo! plans to do please leave a comment.
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7:49 am on November 30th, 2012 1
Korean market alone seems to be too small to deserve service customization to match koreans taste ….
7:07 pm on November 30th, 2012 2
I’ve always said if your going do something you have to focus on it.
You see Google does it right, they focused on Search engines and they got it down pact. Then they went onto other things but they never let their page get cluttered. I read yahoo news and often times I find utter BS stories.
7:51 pm on November 30th, 2012 3
Yahoo has a new CEO, she used to work for Google so maybe she’s worried that with their new future outlook a Google type raid would soon be in the works by S. Korean police/prosecutors.
9:22 pm on November 30th, 2012 4
Good riddance to the American company that sucks to balls. Americans couldn’t compete in the market so they high tail out of ROK.
9:34 pm on November 30th, 2012 5
Which international market do Daum and Naver compete in?
9:47 pm on November 30th, 2012 6
Tom sure seems to know a lot of homer sexual lingo…
1:10 am on December 1st, 2012 7
#2,
Yahoo, Naver, Daum…Cluttered BS. Totally agree.
3:40 am on December 1st, 2012 8
Yeah, Yahoo adopted that very cluttered screen look that Korean websites are known for. I’m surprised they didn’t feel at home here.
5:14 am on December 1st, 2012 9
Korean websites are terrible. in fact, pretty much ALL Korean software is terrible.
Just 5 minutes ago, I was trying to identify my ipTime wireless LAN card so I could reinstall the driver. The shoddy Korean driver software was unable to identify it by itself. Instead, it offered about 25 different models to choose from and the customer gets to guess unless they saved the box.
With typical Korean product organization skills, there was no real identifying information on the card itself. There was only a long string of numbers and letters and a barcode printed on a sticker on the card. Buried inside this string was a possible model number that had the same prefix and number as a couple options. Of course its suffix did not match any of the available options.
Did I mention that all the menus on the ipTime driver installation software came out as gibberish? There are two ways to display Hangul on Windows. One way works on all versions of Windows if the Asian language pack is install. The other way only works with Hangul Windows. That was the way ipTime chose to write their pitiful software.
Since the naming scheme they have come up with is not very straightforward, I went to ipTime’s website to see if I could identify my card, being that many LAN adapters, from USB to PCI, share similar model numbers.
You have already guessed that their website didn’t work well. After navigating through several menus, some of which displayed Hangul and some of which displayed gibberish in the typical Korean lack of consistency in anything that is ever done, I came to the page I was looking for. At this point, none of the menus would work at all. After a few minuets of frustration, I tried Explorer and everything worked, with the addition of fancier moving menus that were a distraction rather than an enhancement.
Korean Yahoo was a cluttered mess, like most Korean websites, and was difficult for a foreigner to use once they removed the Go to English Yahoo button and buried it somewhere in the clutter.
Daum and Naver are a poorly organized mess with far too many secret sponsored links but they return better results than Korean Yahoo or Google.
Thank you for allowing me to vent.
By the way, Korean Google will sometimes take you to the Korean website. To avoid this, type “/ncr” after the google dot com. This stands for “no country redirect” and is very necessary after Google removed the Google in English button from the bottom. I hope that is helpful information.
7:43 pm on December 2nd, 2012 10
“By the way, Korean Google will sometimes take you to the Korean website. To avoid this, type “/ncr” after the google dot com. This stands for “no country redirect” and is very necessary after Google removed the Google in English button from the bottom. I hope that is helpful information.”
Thanks for the tip, but there is a ‘go to google.com’ link at the bottom of the page.
6:21 am on December 3rd, 2012 11
I see that now. It requires Java to display that option and that is generally turned off for security reasons. Previously, that option was an HTML link.
I shall amend my statement to recommend the /ncr option be used in the event Google’s Java-based link is unavailable.
Thanks for the clarification.
10:36 pm on January 4th, 2013 12
A few weeks ago I used Google again on a Korean computer which defaulted in Korean Hangul Google and there was no “go to google.com” link anywhere on it that would take me to US English Google. Java was running and there were no unusual settings. I cant recall exactly how but I was able to go to Korean Google that was in English but the results were targeted to Korea. The “/ncr” was necessary to navigate to US English Google. Am I the only one having problems with this or am I the only one who uses a variety of Korean and American computers?