Yahoo(!) Fail(!)

A bit of advice for all the giant web companies out there; don't allow this to happen to your major, popular, high-profile services:
Been like that for the past 20 minutes or so. I mean, do they want to lose their userbase?

More on why Yahoo is in trouble

At Google, they apparently have nice perks, like free food, gym, big monitors, 20% time, and so forth.

At Yahoo, on the other hand, people throw balls at you. Really. I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.

Now, call me boring and cowardly, but that seems like a hellish work environment to me. Who could develop a working search engine, after all, if at any moment they might be hit in the face with rubber things?

Yahoo(!?% et al.) treading a dangerous path...

So, apparently, Yahoo is messing with its ad pricing algorithm, increasing the minimum price for some keywords. This is the same Yahoo which is trying to do whatever it can to ward off Microsoft.

If Google was doing this, it would be interesting, and might have some potential. For Yahoo, it is horribly stupid. The thing is, in this day and age, why is someone using Yahoo for advertising? In most cases, probably the same reason they're using Yahoo for anything else; they are used to it. If Yahoo makes confusing changes to any of its generally rather inferior services, people will flee. I'd be amazed if this ad thing isn't catastrophic for them; people who are confused or worried by the changes will just jump ship to Google.

The Decline and Fall of Yahoo(!)

It's more or less an open secret that Yahoo?%! has been busy falling apart for the last few years. They've failed to produce anything useful, they've lost market share, and they've become a bit of a joke all around.

A few months ago, Microsoft, the other market leader in frighteningly crap webservices, attempted to buy them. Yahoo!!§^&!!! wasn't having any of it, and is resisting. Given that they're facing a battle with their shareholders, you might reasonably expect them to sort themselves out, right? Well, not quite.

They have, in fact, fired hundreds of their staff, reorganised, launched two rather pointless services (Yahoo Video and the Flickr Video thing) to compete with each other, with the Flickr one being crippled for the benefit of the awful Yahoo?!!? one.

And now, they are apparently muttering about putting Google's ads on their sites instead of their own. Poor Yahoo. There was a time when they were the biggest, a time when they had the opportunity to buy Google for a pittance. And now look at them. About to be bought by also-dying (have you seen Vista? Office 2007? Poor, confused Server 2008? Live Spaces?!) Microsoft, and relying on the company they once turned down for money.

For the record, I hope that Microsoft doesn't manage to buy them. If Yahoo has done one sensible thing, it has been to leave del.icio.us, which they own, well enough alone. It's the only one of their services that I use. I just know that Microsoft would do something unutterably horrible to it; again, have you seen Live Spaces?