Hey Bill, my ac in yhoo is 14ps. What's yours these days?
>>Dear Terry Semel:
On behalf of all enthusiastic Yahoo users, I would like to let you know that we're really worried about Yahoo.
Like millions of people, I use my.yahoo.com as the default home page in my browser. It's a great page: Every time it pops up it shows me my stocks, customized news, and local movie times, and I can edit it easily to reveal other cool stuff. I also use many other Yahoo features, including search, mail, finance, and weather, each of which conveniently has its own address (like weather.yahoo.com). No, I don't use all Yahoo features. And no, I have never paid Yahoo a dime for all that service.
This helps explain why I like Yahoo so much. I also like the company's style, including those funny, offbeat ads it used to run when dot-coms bought television advertising. I like the whole story about how the company got started (although I am very jealous of the venture capitalists who funded the company). Most of all, I like the fact that Yahoo paid a lot of attention to using technology to deliver absolutely the best service possible on the Internet. Yahoo was always the site designed to bring pages up and respond to user requests as fast as possible.
But Netscape and Webvan were likable companies too. Based on my experience over the past six months, I am worried that Yahoo may have a similar fate in store. As Yahoo looks for new ways to grow, it is in danger of losing its core value as a service. Here's evidence:
Personal home page: My home page now opens more slowly than before, sometimes taking 30 seconds to serve up all the data that used to take less than ten seconds. This is such a drastic change, and such an annoyance at the beginning of my workday, that I am now actively looking for an alternative to My Yahoo. If I abandon My Yahoo, I'll also abandon Yahoo Finance, which I only use because it's conveniently linked to my home page.
Search: I already turn to Google for most searches. Yahoo uses Google technology, but only on its own database of Web pages, which were discovered and cataloged differently than Google's. So Google searches are better and seem faster.
E-mail: Any e-mail sent to my FORTUNE e-mail account is forwarded to my Yahoo Mail account. And in the past month or so, Yahoo Mail has become dysfunctional. When I forward reader messages to FORTUNE's letters editor now, I often get the following response after sending along just four or five messages: "There was a problem accessing your mailbox. This is most likely a temporary problem that should resolve itself within ten minutes. We apologize for the inconvenience. Thank you." In other words, I can't process all my e-mail in this session but instead have to log off, wait, and log back on--repeatedly. This has tripled the time it takes to process my messages. Rumor has it that you are planning a paid e-mail service. I suspect that you are leaving your free e-mail service as it is (i.e., broken) while you design a better one that you will charge for. Needless to say, I am looking for a new e-mail provider.
Marketing: We users recognize that Yahoo needs to have a working business model that allows it to grow and prosper. In fact, most of us have such loyalty that we'd probably pay for classy, useful premium services from Yahoo, especially now that it's harder and harder to find free alternatives on the Web. But Yahoo hasn't been treating users with class recently. There was that widely reported example when you reset users' preferences without asking permission. Here's the notice I got from you: "We have reset your marketing preferences and, unless you decide to change these preferences, you may begin receiving marketing messages from Yahoo! about ways to enhance your Yahoo! experience, including special offers and new features." But I had specifically asked not to get such messages! Furthermore, Yahoo has been launching pop-up browser windows, asking for marketing information on log-in screens, increasing the size of ads on free-content pages, and doing other things that sully my experience, all to try to increase revenue from its free services.
Increasing revenue is a fine goal, especially when revenue has been essentially flat, around $180 million a quarter for five quarters. But as our experience has deteriorated, we users have watched a parade of new executives arrive, armed with media backgrounds like yours. The problem is that this is not Warner Bros., Mr. Semel. We have been loyal to perhaps the best Internet company around. And now Yahoo seems to be run by people who don't understand the technology culture that made it such a great value.
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