After the saga of Yahoo is over, many people will find reasons as to why Yahoo failed. I know the real reason: it's a boring, impersonal, faceless bureaucracy. Although Yang and Filo try to keep it culturally cool (free soda and coffee for all employees!), they have utterly failed.
The Yahoo brand has no identifiable or consistent "voice".
The amazing thing to me is that someone hasn't renamed Yahoo to:
Here's all the proof you'll ever need - an email from the people that run Panama (aka "Yahoo! Search Marketing".)
YSM-Tier2Support to me Dear Valued Client, We will be performing a routine system maintenance during the following time frames on Friday, June 6, 2008: 6:00AM PST to 11:00AM PST 7:00PM PST to Saturday June 7 2:00AM PST The following end-points will be unavailable during maintenance: https://ews11.marketing.ews.yahooapis.com/ https://ews12.marketing.ews.yahooapis.com/ https://ews13.marketing.ews.yahooapis.com/ https://ews41.marketing.ews.yahooapis.com/ Should you have any questions regarding this matter,
please contact your account manager directly or technical services at ews-help@yahoo-inc.com. Thank you for choosing Yahoo! Search Marketing! Sincerely, Technical Services Yahoo! Search Marketing
Note how there's not a real person's name in the whole email - including mine. FYI, my actual name is not "Valued Client".
Look at the 4 deep subdomains that Yahoo forces on it's services. https://ews12.marketing.ews.yahooapis.com/. There's two ews's in there! No wonder I can never remember that URL to login to my account. Compare to say: http://adwords.google.com, or even adwords.com.
And WTF is a "end-point"?!?
Even the email addresses they use are robotic. Apparently, it's not a real Yahoo email unless there is a dash in it somewhere: ews-help@yahoo-inc.com
But luckily, they recover from this unbranded, un-personal, techno blather form-letter email with the friendly closing:
Thank you for choosing Yahoo! Search Marketing!
Yay!
Labels: yahoo
¶ 6/03/2008
