Yahoo extreme lameness…
Posted on January 3, 2007
Sometimes little things help us see the big picture. (I wish I had shorted Dell two years ago when I had the worst customer support experience ever after buying my last system from them.) Ah well… on to Yahoo.
We all know the broadside Google has made on Yahoo with their advertising products, Google Maps and so on. Google Finance may not be a huge hit yet but the response Yahoo has made has been very poor. As a frequent user of both it seems to me that the people behind Yahoo Finance don’t actually use it. The new advanced charting features basically toss you out of the fundamental menu that makes Yahoo better than Google. In trying to improve charts to look more like Google they have made their leading site less usable and made it that much easier for Google.
This brings me to my real reason for posting which is Picasa versus Flickr. (Again I’m a user of both.) Just recently Google poked me with the offer to use their new web album feature. What’s important about this is that since my Mac doesn’t have Picasa, Google nicely offers me a download that will allow me to integrate easily with my iPhoto content and start using Picasa right away. Why hasn’t Flickr done this in the last year?
Before hitting the comment button I do know that one can make all this work in Flickr. This is not my point. There are millions of iPhoto users out there who are great potential users of a service like Flickr. Why not make it easy for them and create a little software to make it happen?
This is the sort of thing that Yahoo is facing across the board. Google isn’t perfect but they keep executing in a way that makes sense and is consistent (much of the time) with Web 2.0 software tenants.
It bothers me when companies get big and stop being smart, eventually the point of being stupid. The Yahoo guys were super smart and way ahead of the curve ten years ago. Today the company seems hopelessly stuck in the muck. Google will continue to have fun at their expense. It seems natural for them to be acquired either by a similary struggling Microsoft or another large media company.
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That’s kind of the feeling I get with Google since it took over Blogger and YouTube seems that it’s become a dormant giant.