What is Yahoo Doing?

I have many friends at Yahoo who I respect a lot and hence I don't want to write negative things about the company, but what they just pulled off on this poor consumer is unbelievable.

I came back from the Microsoft briefing I wrote about below, and docked my laptop.  Started Yahoo IM, and got a message saying "Yahoo can automatically load updates, would you like it?"  I said yes, then I got a window popping up saying "now Yahoo toolbar has Yahoo Messenger embedded, would you like it?"  I said yes, and Yahoo did three things.

1) The toolbar they updated is now twice as thick as the old one and take up a lot more space on the top of my browser, and a lot of the space they take is blank.  I can't collapse it.  This ridiculous.

2) They change my homepage to www.yahoo.com.  Hijacking somebody's homepage is what sketchy sites do, not the #2 site on the Internet.  But here is the sad part, the page they hijacked was http://my.yahoo.com, one of their pages.  That's the page that's been customized by me, and that's hard to switch out of.  It's their best property that serves their best ads. They take that away and put a generic one in its stead.  How's that for shooting yourself in the foot? 

3) To add insult to injury, I try to load an image in my blog post, and this time the Yahoo toolbar popup blocker is blocking pages typepad is trying to serve me.  Now I have to turn that off as well.

How much pain do they think users can take before they get to the benefits of their product.  Answer, not a lot.  My Yahoo toolbar is gone...

Comments

[Ranjit Padmanabhan]

Indeed! If I had to abstract the qualitative difference between Y! and Google, it's that in the past few months Yahoo has given up any pretense of acknowledging that their users may be halfway intelligent.

The Y! toolbar is bulky, bloated, and intrusive. GONE!

The Home Page is weighted down with JavaScript and the search form grabs your keystrokes, thereby holding you captive until the entire page loads. GOODBYE, Big Y - Hello Google!

Messenger releases are buggy and play badly with IE - I'll blame both Y! and M$ for that one.

While I'm sure there's a lot of clever stuff going on there, I'll probably never make it past their front door to know.

[zheng]

Toolbars can easily take over your computer:-)

http://static.flickr.com/104/296770606_2fa603c64c.jpg

[Emre Sokullu]

I guess this happened with Windows - Internet Explorer 6 duo? I don't have chance to try that, but maybe that's because Yahoo assumes you already switched to Internet Explorer 7. Because IE7 provides you very large workspace, Yahoo may have reconfigured their new toolbar according to the new sizes.

But if I were you, I'd use Firefox, meebo, and not bother with any toolbar offerings :)

[Ben]

I love Yahoo and I am pretty okay with agreessive tactics...but this blew up my browser and it took me an hour to get it to stabilize...

[Baris Aksoy]

Maybe this is the first outcome of the recently announced reorganization ;-)

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2006/12/will_yahoos_reo.html

MSFT went through similar reorganization to boost growth. It's too early to say for MSFT but I think they're on the right path. Can Yahoo make this reorg work? I doubt it.