{"id":26873,"date":"2009-07-29T10:21:10","date_gmt":"2009-07-29T10:21:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/gregladen\/2009\/07\/29\/ms-yahoo-we-are-doomed\/"},"modified":"2009-07-29T10:21:10","modified_gmt":"2009-07-29T10:21:10","slug":"ms-yahoo-we-are-doomed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/29\/ms-yahoo-we-are-doomed\/","title":{"rendered":"MS + Yahoo = We are Doomed"},"content":{"rendered":"

My own personal experience with Yahoo is a tale of woe.<\/p>\n


\nYears ago, I co-moderated what was then the most heavily used Internet discussion forum on Human Evolution and related topics (which has since evolved into PalAnth<\/a>. That group was on Yahoo. The three or four of us (depending on when) who moderated the group found ourselves, one day, with no superadmin account. The superadmin was a login that allowed important changes to be made, such as adding other moderators or admins, and so on. For some reason or another, the superadmin account had gone away, and we lost the ability to make fundamental and important changes. This would be OK for a while, but eventually we would have to have superadmin privileges. So, we contacted Yahoo’s tech people to see what we could do.<\/p>\n

We didn’t hear back from them.<\/p>\n

So, we contacted them again, and tried other ways to contact them, and got other people to try to contact them, and so on and so forth. For nearly one year we tried and tried and tried to get anyone to give us any response from Yahoo.<\/p>\n

But they would not help us. Eventually, we simply closed down the forum. That forum was not only the number one Human Evolution discussion group on the planet at the time, but it was fairly active and stood up well in numerical comparison to Yahoo groups in general. Putting it simply, there are a number of reasons that we should not have been ignored.<\/p>\n

That is my own personal story as to why I don’t do Yahoo. It is not my only story. I have found Yahoo to be ineffective or unresponsive or just plain bad at what they do over and over again, and I’m sure you are aware of their highly questionable corporate practices.<\/p>\n

And now, Yahoo is going into a ten year deal with Microsoft to produce a new search facility<\/a>, to compete with Google.<\/p>\n

I hope MS-Yahoo gives Google a run for their money, because competition is good (within limits). Google has been doing quite well without much real competition, because, I think, they’ve understood that the competition is out there and that it is only a matter of time before someone does what Google itself did … come out of nowhere and take over the world. Obviously, the Microsoft-Yahoo deal is not the same thing as coming out of nowhere, and in fact, it is almost certainly doomed to fail. But before it fails, I hope it serves a small purpose.<\/p>\n

But then, I do hope it goes away, because I don’t want to have to deal with other people who are using the service. It is mildly annoying to hear people always saying “oh, just Google that” … I certainly don’t want to hear people saying “Oh, let’s yahoo that.” I would have to slap people upside the head.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My own personal experience with Yahoo is a tale of woe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[57],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5fhV1-6Zr","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26873"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26873\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}