Yahoo! shuts down online storage service Briefcase to cut costs

Yahoo! Briefcase, an online service that began nearly a decade ago, will soon vanish from the cyberspace.

Users of this service, which offers 30 MB storage space with a Web 1.0 capacity, nowadays gets a 'not-so-welcome' greeting, which says: ''You must download or delete your files by March 30, 2009. After this date, you will not be able to access your Yahoo! Briefcase account and your files will be deleted.''

Briefcase, which offered 30MB of online storage, was launched almost 10 years ago. However, "usage has been significantly declining over the years, as users outgrew the need for Yahoo Briefcase and turned to offerings with much more storage and enhanced sharing capabilities", the company said in a statement.

Other services, such as Yahoo Mail and Flickr, offer far greater storage capacity, and the use of Briefcase has fallen in recent years, Yahoo said in a statement. It expects the move to help it focus on services that are more widely used, according to Yahoo.

The internet search firm is passing through a phase of crisis and it is tightening its budget and is focusing on more revenue-generating projects.

CEO Carol Bartz, who joined the company this month (See: Yahoo has new CEO, Carol Bartz), is trying to revive growth amid a slump in online advertising, Yahoo's main source of revenue.

Bartztook over from Jerry Yang, who stepped down after Yahoo's rejection of a $47.5-billion takeover offer from Microsoft Corp. annoyed investors.

Just days after Bartz took the job, the company said it would freeze pay for many of its employees. In October Yahoo said it was cutting at least 10 per cent of its workforce.