| I'm not hating brand in the abstract. I've had specific technical, aesthetic and business issues with Yahoo throughout it's entire existence. Technically I've had a lot of trouble with Yahoo mail, and those types of problems have been typical for me with every service of theirs I've ever tried in the past. For example, I often have trouble emailing people who have yahoo accounts due to bizarre spam filtering policies, some of which have no resolution path. I also have a Yahoo email account, and my mail client complains almost daily that it can't connect or my password is wrong. It's just my personal taste but aesthetically, I can't tolerate their interface design. I'd be willing to bet Godaddy recruited their web designers from Yahoo. I started noticing them as a 'brand only' company when I was in Japan in 2003. A local telecom was marketing a Yahoo branded DSL services. I suppose they where trying an AOL play (at least they had a focused business goal, and they've updated their design sense this century), but the combination of all this product noise (i.e. unrelated service offerings), combined with bad UX make the Yahoo brand ephemeral to me. Other then an email service, for the life of me, I can't put my finger on what they do. Crawl around the web and put a yahoo sticker on anything they think is cool? Now however, maybe their brand can start to represent something I care about, but they'll have to actually do some useful things too. And then there's this: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/email_address |