The above picture, titled "Is This What Happens When Redundancies Attack", was taken at Yahoo! when the international mobile team in London were closed down for delivering the award winning FIFA World Cup 2006 mobile site. Not soon after the announcement this wall caved in!
It now seems appropriate again when talking about Yahoo! After all they have been going down the toilet for sometime now. Shareholders must still be cringing about not being taken over by Microsoft, for 40 USD, a share a couple of years ago! Ho hum. On the other hand Microsoft shareholders are probably still celebrating!
The latest piece of news about Yahoo! that has annoyed me greatly is the fact that they seem to have removed all blogs from their Yahoo! Pulse product. This has affected me directly and they didn't have the courtesy to actually let me know they were going to do this!
Sometime around 2005, Yahoo! launched their social product - 360 in Europe. I was an avid user and over the course of a couple of years blogged about 400 times using it. When Yahoo! 360 closed down (seriously how could Yahoo! fail at a social product with 500 million users in an era when social web sites were exploding? It's beyond me - but that's another story) Yahoo! allowed users to migrate their 360 blogs to Yahoo! Pulse. I gladly did as I didn't want to lose all of the work I had put into my blog. My 360 blog sat quite happily within Pulse until recently.
Today when I looked I found that it was no longer there. After a quick look on the internet a couple of Yahoo! answer users had pointed out that the blogs have simply been removed. Apparently Pulse users were alerted by a banner ad. OK as far as I am aware one of Yahoo!'s biggest products is email. They couldn't spend the time to actually let Pulse users know this would happen via email? Shocking!
I Guess not? Communicating with your Customers via your biggest distribution mechanism seems to be a step too far for some companies! ;-)
Yahoo! Should learn from the mobile carriers of this world. I mean even Vodafone can alert their users via SMS when they are closing, oddly coincidentally, their 360 product!
I am not sure how much longer I can support the ever flagging Yahoo! After this I think I am going to move permanently away from their email service as well. Not sure what to do about Flickr. I really love that product. Maybe that's the only tie I will have to Yahoo! Who knows. Next thing you know that'll be closed down without notification!
I loved working for Yahoo! and loved their products. That love has waned dramatically since they lost seemingly all creativity. It's a real shame they are going the way of the above pictured toilet.
Cheers
m
Yahoo is great for signing up for things I know are going to spam my email.
ReplyDeleteI enjoy your flickr account as well.
That is a good reaon to keep the account! I like it. Yeah Not sure I could migrate away from Flickr just yet. Glad you like the photos!
ReplyDelete