06 July 2009

Does Yahoo! have a death wish?

Yahoo! seem to be determined to drive away all their customers.

First they announced that they were closing their Geocities web sites (after years of neglect), which will break millions of links and mean the loss of much useful material from the web (as well as much rubbish).

Now my daughter has discovered that her Yahoo! mail account no longer works; she can read mail, but can't reply.

It appears that the reason is that they have changed their mail service so that it no longer supports the Opera browser. As a result, my daughter has switched to Gmail.

Well, I've been advising her to do that for years, ever since I discovered just how unreliable Yahoo can be. They "lost" my Geocities web pages for two months. They eventually came back, but too late. Within two days of their disappearing from the web, I had moved them to a new host. Perhaps others whose web pages may be orphaned by the closing of Geocities could do that too. The only disadvantage is that Google searches still point to the old site.

No sooner were my Geocities pages back up than they lost my e-mail account for six months. And when it came back they had lost all my archived messages. They lost my Yahoo 360 account, which was no great loss because it was pretty clunky anyway. The only problem is that I have no access to anyone else on Yahoo 360, and they keep urging me to "join" -- a bit stupid, since I have already joined.

Perhaps Yahoo are retrenching because they are losing money, but one reason for their losing money is that they are alienating their customers like this. They buy services (like Geocities and Webrings) from other people, and then mess them up, and wonder why they lose money. They recently took over MyBlogLog -- I hope they don't mess that up too. Actually it is pretty messed up already. On my other blog (and most WordPress blogs) they show that the only visitors are Eric, Reesa10, SteveHo and Rafer. People have been asking them to fix that bug for years, but it seems that they are neglecting MyBlogLog just as they are neglecting the other things they took over, which is why BlogCatalog is better -- at least it shows who the real visitors are.

3 comments:

James Higham said...

Yahoo are an absolute pain in yhe neck, taking over things such as Mybloglog, wrecking it and demanding you sign in all the time.

I don't mind doing it for google/blogger becasue they're my main playing field but I never asked for Yahoo to come into my life in any way.

CherryPie said...

They took over Flickr too and upset people there.

Wild River Guitar said...

I used to like yahoo after nearly 10 years of yahoo mail I gave up on it trying to sing in was a pain it would never say the serer is down so i joined hotmail/live whatever Bing are going to call it thats another story but no i love google its plain and simple and it works and they give me free help not like mybloglogs stupid Get Sadisfaction Rubbish where you can upgrade to pro Google know where the money is to be made yahoo are just trying to sponge it out of you.

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