In its quest to rebuild Flickr into the premier photo service it once was, Yahoo has swiped Google’s ex-global director of product marketing, Bernardo Hernandez, and given him the ultimate task — taking down Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and a whole host of other services so Flickr can reign supreme.
Our spanish-speaking counterpart, Gizmodo en Español, talked to Hernandez about the road ahead:
The most important challenge that Flickr is facing is its identity. Six or seven years ago, it did everything in photos, now it’s the leader in nothing. What is its key competitive advantage? That’s the first thing we have to find out.
There’s no denying Flickr was in some pretty dire straits before — no one would have been surprised to see it fade from existence altogether. But somehow, Marissa Meyer managed to get the right team together and pull Flickr out of the depths of obsolescence just in the nick of time. Now they just need to figure out what to do with their reinvigorated property. Hernandez emphasises:
We all have a fairly clear picture of how we use photos in Instagram, Facebook, Google+, etc. I want to do the same with Flickr… Mobile will be the key component. Nothing you do with photos today can ignore mobile
When you consider caring out a niche in a marketed that’s already so over-saturated with photo services, apps, filters, curators, composers, cloud storers, what have you — it starts to seem like an impossible task. And hopefully, they’ve got the right people on the job. At least, Hernandez seems to think so:
I think Marissa is doing a great job. She’s starting to revitalize Yahoo in the place I think you always needs it most: talent. Her goal with Yahoo is to help people refocus their daily routines. I think that objective was lost in the last few years and now it needs to be recovered.
Only time will tell if the new and improved Yahoo can manage to recreate even a modicum of what they had in their glory days. But for now, you can read the rest of what Bernardo Hernandez had to say about his move to Flickr over at Gizmodo en Español.