Have you ever tried using Yahoo! Mail? I have an account there, for the only reason that I've had it since the mid-late nineties. They keep making it more complex and less useful. I would say one out of 10 times I try to check it, it won't load for god knows what reason. Similarly when you send mail, you often get an error message, so you resend the message only to find that you've just sent the same thing twice. Brilliant. I wouldn't hire anyone from Yahoo! who is in charge of software either.
If it weren't for fantasy football, which they pretty much dominate, I don't know what service they would offer that people actually care about. And this: This is such a backwards corporate strategy that many companies beyond Yahoo! employ. There was a great expose on the dismantling of Sears that I read (on Hubski, I think) that basically accused them of the same thing, which is to divide and conquer within your own company, forcing your individual business units to compete with one another rather than to cooperate against outside competitors.Because Flickr wasn't as profitable as some of the other bigger properties, like Yahoo Mail or Yahoo Sports, it wasn't given the resources that were dedicated to other products.
They have done every single thing wrong in the last... shit, the whole last decade now, and yet, for some mindblowing reason, they are still in the top five most popular websites worldwide and, some months, are the top websites in the US
Oh man, I remember when there password reset was just a postal code and a security question. Great times. pg has a great write-up on Yahoo and it's fall from grace, but I don't know that I would not hire anyone from Yahoo who was in charge of software. Makes you wonder what his interviews went like.
Thanks for sharing that article - great read.