Getty Image
Does anyone actually use Yahoo! for anything anymore? Until somewhat recently, I still used Yahoo! as my primary personal email account. I know, I know. It’s embarrassing, but I had had the damn thing since like nineteen-freaking-ninety-eight and — since I hadn’t had any issues with it — I wasn’t in a hurry to transfer 15+ years of contacts. But then all of a sudden the service just completely sh*t the bed. Both incoming and outgoing emails would be delayed anywhere from hours to days and the web interface became a veritable nightmare to use.
Yahoo! has been dipping their toes into original content for a little while now, and obviously there’s the huge news that they’ve picked up Community. But if the experience of watching it is anything like it was watching the excellent Burning Love when that first came out, then I worry for Community fans. On average, it would take 20-30 minutes to watch a 10 minute episode thanks to their terrible media player lagging, freezing and randomly restarting in the middle of an episode. Sure, you can make decent programming, but do you have anything to play it on?
So I guess Yahoo! themselves have been faced with their own mortality, because a parcel of land that they had planned to build an additional 3 million square feet of office space is now going to be paved over and used as off-site parking for 49ers fans at Levi Stadium. The project, which has now been scrapped, had been approved in 2010 to build 13 six-story buildings — the largest project ever approved in Santa Clara.
City records show general contractor Devcon Construction Inc. submitted grading, paving and striping permits for parking lot improvements on the Yahoo site June 20. The San Francisco 49ers also show the parcel as one of the largest available lots on the team’s interactive parking website. A team spokesman told me that the 49ers had reached an agreement with the property owner earlier this year.
The move suggests Yahoo remains in no hurry to build, which is perhaps not surprising given that the Internet pioneer has been shrinking, not growing, its real estate footprint in recent years.
Financial details or length of term for the deal with the 49ers have not been released, but given that the site is estimated to hold up to 7,200 cars, I think it’s safe to say that the 49ers are pretty much going to be paying Joel McHale’s salary next year.
