Yahoo to shut down Maps and other services

California-based Yahoo Inc will be shutting down its maps website and other services at the end of the month, Yahoo's chief architect, Amotz Maimon said in a blog post. 

The move comes as Yahoo Inc wants to focus on its search, communications and digital content.

Yahoo Inc's Maps was facing intense competition from Google Inc's Maps service.

Maimon, in the blog post, said Yahoo Inc's search and other services including photo-sharing website Flickr will continue to support Yahoo Maps. In May, Yahoo Inc updated its Flickr service on mobile and desktop platforms, as well as the web service, which help users better organise their photos, share images and videos given 1TB of free storage space. The improved Flickr app for Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows are now available. 

On June 15, Yahoo Inc will stop support to built-in Yahoo mail app running on iOS5 or older versions in iPhones. While Yahoo Inc is expected to release an update for its mail service running on Apple's iOS 8.3 by 2015.

The company will be closing down Philippines homepage, Yahoo Music services in France and Canada and Yahoo Movies in Spain. Yahoo TV and Yahoo Autos will be closed down in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy by June-end. 

Also Yahoo Pipes -- a tool that aggregates Web content for developers -- will not allow creation of new pipes after August 30. Pipes infrastructure will run until September 30 in read-only mode to help developers migrate their data.

According to NDTV, these steps are being taken under pressure by Yahoo Inc chief executive Marissa Mayer, to swiftly strengthen the company's media and advertising business and to bring about a meaningful revenue growth.  

In 2014, Yahoo hired management consultant McKinsey to find efficiencies in its business. Soon after, Mayer announced layoffs affecting about 1% of Yahoo's global staff, following a 3% reduction late last year.