Telling Yahoo what it does not want to hear

[Joe Dunphy]

Undiplomatic (but honest) remarks posted to this thread on the Jumpcut
suggestion board at Yahoo:


http://suggestions.yahoo.com/detail/?prop=jumpcut&fid=78805


See for yourself if it stays posted. If you're reading this ages after
the fact, like next year or something, know that at the time I wrote
this, Yahoo was facing the public announced threat of a hostile
takeover by Microsoft, and that while nobody knew yet how that fight
would turn out, most were guessing that Microsoft would succeed. I'm
hoping that Yahoo will succeed in fighting off the attempt, as
periodically exasperated as I get with them.

But sometimes, you have to tell people what they need to hear instead
of what they want to hear, and maybe not be that gentle about it,
because too many years of being on top has left them more than a
little cocky.



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Right now, if one sets up a page on Jumpcut and links to it from one's
other pages, one has no way of linking back to them from it. If one
has Webring memberships, this has the potential of annoying Webring -
there is no path back to the ring from one's Jumpcut pages - and it
needlessly costs the user traffic.

Difficulties, one might add, that don't exist at such well established
competitors as Youtube and Metacafe, the former affiliated with a
company (Google) that has been eating Yahoo's lunch for the last few
years, a fact that has probably done a lot to make Yahoo a more
vulnerable looking and thus more attractive target for a takeover. A
little courtesy of Yahoo's part, a little consideration on this point
may bring some of that lost traffic back.

Of course, if you guys would rather continue ignoring the users and,
following a successful Microsoft takeover and inevitable post takeover
downsizing, end up pounding the pavement looking for jobs in IT during
this, the era that has brought us the word "bangalored", you can do
that, too. Yes, that was a little blunt, but as I've literally never
seen Yahoo positively respond to any of the multitude of
diplomatically phrased and utterly reasonable suggestions put to it
over the years, maybe it's time to be direct.

Look through the archives, really read them, and you'll find a
multitude of simple things that you can do (eg. restoring sound the
groups pages) that would improve user relations overnight.



Happier users are more active users. More use = more traffic = higher
ad revenues, bringing you a higher buyout cost needed for the takeover
to work, because Yahoo shareholders will be in less of a mood to sell.

This is why Microsoft is breathing down your necks - you've p***ed off
so many users for just for the sake of proving that you can do your
own thing and driven off so much content in the process, and ad
revenue with it, that you've weakened yourself to the point of looking
like easy prey. The only way you're going to save your company and
your careers is by winning a lot of users back in a real hurry.

Lose the attitude and learn to listen respectfully to your users and
offer them more than just handholding, or it's over. That's not a
threat, it's a fact, the lesson that you should be learning from
what's happening right now, because let's be honest, guys ...



The Job Market is a cold, frequently unreasonable place and you're
about to be associated with failure on an epic scale, the destruction
of a multibillion dollar corporation. Who's going to hire you after
that?

You have at most a few months to find a way to save yourselves. You
can spend it using large amounts of scarce resources in an industry in
which the time consuming realities of debugging ensure the trial and
mostly error nature of product development looking for the brilliant
new product that will shoot your stock prices through the roof in
time, at a time when the name "yahoo" inspires mass skepticism ....
or ....

You guys can just start being nice. It doesn't cost you anything
monetarily, and it might just save your jobs. Seriously. Give it some
thought. But please do it soon, if you're going to do it at all.

[Joe Dunphy]

If there are any followups to this post, you'll be able to find them
through this page


http://groups.google.com/group/josephdunphy/web/yahoo-doesnt-want-to-hear-this