Piling on Yahoo

What's wrong with Yahoo? It seems dysfunctional far too often these days. It keeps changing its focus. Is it, at its core, a media producer? A search and advertising platform?

How can CEO Terry Semel tell an audience in March that it's new Panama search and advertising system -- a direct Google competitor -- will show "some very exciting numbers" in the first quarter...and then have first-quarter earnings come out Tuesday showing an 11% decline?

For that matter, I have a little beef with Yahoo -- and I wonder if it's a sign of what's going on inside.

My move to Microsoft Vista in the past month has made me realize that Yahoo has totally blown its $160 million purchase of Musicmatch. Yahoo has created a customer-experience nightmare by forcing Musicmatch users over to the Yahoo Music Jukebox, which is allegedly built on Musicmatch. But the migration is painful.

To get the "Plus" version I'd paid for under the Musicmatch banner, I had to pay up front for Yahoo's version of Plus, and then ask for a refund, which is yet to arrive.

Songs I downloaded in Musicmatch won't play on Yahoo. And the Yahoo player lacks some of the extras I loved in Musicmatch, like a function that generated playlists of similar kinds of songs, and an ability to convert WAV files to MP3s.

So Yahoo has given Musicmatch fans -- and potential Yahoo Music fans -- a woefully inadequate replacement. In fact, Yahoo's player seems inferior to just about every music player out there. How's that a good strategy?