You may remember the update that rolled out for Yahoo Mail not too long ago. Reception wasn’t too great with the users. Bad design and slow, confusing users is not what you’d want from a webmail client. Tabs got removed too, and replaced by a multitask feature.
But now things have gone from bad to worse for Yahoo Mail. Kara Swisher posted at AllthingsD that she obtained an internal memo concerning Yahoo Mail. Apparently, just 25% of the Yahoo crew uses Yahoo Mail. The rest of them still stick with Outlook. This is painful: there’s the saying ‘eat your own dog food’, meaning if you don’t use your own products or services, why should others outside your company do so?
This comes at a bad time for Yahoo Mail, which already saw a revamping late last year. Later on in April this year a new Yahoo Mail app was released for both Android and iOS tablets.
A quote from the internal memo, sent by Jeff Bonforte, SVP Communications Products and Randy Roumillat, CIO:
Earlier this year we asked you to move to Yahoo Mail for your corporate email account. 25% of you made the switch (thank you). But even if we used the most generous of grading curves (say, the one from organic chemistry), we have clearly failed in our goal to move our co-workers to Yahoo Mail.
And about leaving Outlook for Yahoo Mail:
First, it doesn’t feel like we are asking you to abandon some glorious place of communications nirvana. At this point in your life, Outlook may be familiar, which we can often confuse with productive or well designed. Certainly, we can admire the application for its survival, an anachronism of the now defunct 90s PC era, a pre-web program written at a time when NT Server terrorized the data center landscape with the confidence of a T-Rex born to yuppie dinosaur parents who fully bought into the illusion of their son’s utter uniqueness because the big-mouthed, tiny-armed monster infant could mimic the gestures of The Itsy-Bitsy Pterodactyl. There was a similar outcry when we moved away from Outlook’s suite-mates in the Microsoft Office dreadnaught. But whether it’s familiarity, laziness or simple stubbornness dressed in a cloak of Ayn Randian Objectivism, the time has come to move on, commrade.
Well, this all seems very well, but the internal memo would have a bit more weight if their own Yahoo Mail would be more appreciated and functioning like a webmail client should. Or in any case, any type of software should. All software should have one purpose: serve the user to get the job or task done asap, no hassle.
Full post on AllthingsD here.
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