Only 25% of Yahoo Staff "Eat Their Own Dog Food"

nk497 writes "Only 25% of Yahoo staff have obeyed the company's request to 'eat their own dog food' and switch to Yahoo Mail, a colorful internal memo has revealed. The leaked email, acquired by All Things Digital, implores staff to move over to the corporate version of Yahoo's webmail system, gently lambasting staff who refuse to part with Microsoft Outlook. The message goes on to take a swipe at what appears to be Yahoo employees' preferred mail client, Microsoft Outlook, describing it as '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.'"

Comments

Wagging the dog.

[DoofusOfDeath]

Another reasonable approach from might be to task, "How does our service need to change, in order for our own employees to want to use it?"

Re:Wagging the dog.

[game kid]

Expecting "reasonable" from Marissa Mayer's Yahoo is like expecting "class 1 laser emission" from Marisa Kirisame's Master Spark.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

Another reasonable approach from might be to task, "How does our service need to change, in order for our own employees to want to use it?"

The more appropriate phrase in this case should be: "Eat Their Own Dog Poo".

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

And why didn't we make sure our own employees liked it before releasing it to the public?

Re:Wagging the dog.

[sonamchauhan]

Only dogs do that!

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Darinbob]

Why should the employees want to use it? "Eat your own dogfood" is a bad idea for your employees, unless you are creating a product intended for those types of employees. Is Yahoo Mail intended to be a corporate mail solution? If so then the employees should be encouraged to use it. If instead it is intended to be a general purpose web mail service, then it may be inappropriate for work.

Similarly, if my company made catheters I most certainly would object to be asked to use one while at work! Similarly, if I was creating a product intended for people with average to low technical aptitude (twitter, facebook) I would strongly object to be required to actually use that product all the time (I'd use it for testing purposes only). If I was at Google I would strenuously object to doing all my documentation by using Google Docs, or read mail via Google Mail, even if I was working on those products to make them better.

People are not cookie cutter clones!

Re:Wagging the dog.

[dreamchaser]

Another reasonable approach from might be to task, "How does our service need to change, in order for our own employees to want to use it?"

That would be reasonable, but honestly they don't have to even do that. If the company says the new standard is X then everyone changes to X. That's a draconian way, and I like your suggestion better, but still, it's Yahoo's systems and standards. They can change them to use whatever tool they want.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah! What does this look like, Facebook?

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Enry]

Google is intending to have their products used by companies that pay for the services. If Google Docs isn't good enough for internal Google employees to use, how can they expect paying customers to be happy with the same kind of service? I can see a section of users with multiple e-mail clients to keep an eye on the competition, but I don't think it would make 75% of employees.

What Yahoo(!) should really be asking is: what is it about Outlook that keeps people using it?

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Dahamma]

Actually, usually. Most dogs hate their own dog poo.

But they do love cat poo. Which in fact is probably a more apt analogy, anyway, because the new Yahoo Mail interface looks like they ate Gmail, had horrible indigestion, and then crapped out something vaguely resembling it.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[abirdman]

Bravo. Very well said. I wonder why using specific software is so often compared to a religious choice-- after conversion to PHP, Oracle, jquery, .NET, whatever, then no other software can be used or contemplated. Bah. Every paged email client, like Yahoo, gmail, or even Outlook's web client, is a dog for managing any more than a screenful of emails at a time.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[SJHillman]

My dog will eat any dog or cat poo except for his own.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[asmkm22]

As the article points out, the memo is encouraging the employees to use the "corporate version" of yahoo's mail client.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Bite The Pillow]

Rtfs, they are the audience. Corporate version.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well for starters, fire the guy who says "our service [needs] to change". Maybe then they can use a stable webmail platform instead of going back to Outlook which they hate but at least they don't have to worry about relearning, finding out features are missing, etc.

Option B would be to support all the old webmail platforms near indefinitely so people can just use whatever they like, although that hints that all the "change" is likely unnecessary fluff or will cause the "old timers" to miss out on stuff because they're not able to use certain features (something I presume they may or may not be missing out on already, but if the majority is using Outlook...it's actually the webmail users who might be missing out).

In all seriousness, I understand what you're trying to say. But even with a fantastic new product/service/whatever that offers a disruptive change, plenty of people often won't migrate from an old standard. Look no further than all the Outlook users. :)

Re:Wagging the dog.

[su5so10]

I work at Google and I've never seen anyone here use anything besides gmail for corporate mail.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Eskarel]

Well based on the memo it might be a good start to recognise that people don't really want to use web based tools for core tasks, particularly event based ones like e-mail. Webmail if fine and dandy for "check it once a day" type of e-mail communication, but corporate e-mail simply isn't that.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[DMUTPeregrine]

Google docs is fine for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations. It's not a replacement for notepad, and you can't easily stick google docs documents into your version control system with the code they document.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

>My dog will eat any dog or cat poo except for his own.

>Moderation: +1 Informative

You people crack me the fuck up.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[msobkow]

The current incarnation of the Yahoo WebMail service is the worst webmail interface I've ever used. I don't blame the employees for avoiding it like the plague -- and I've had my Yahoo account for around a decade. This latest version is a serious step backwards. The icons make no sense, there are "hidden" popup activation areas all over the place, and it's uglier than sin.

I don't know what their "usability" department has been doing, but it sure as hell isn't researching what people might actually want in a webmail interface.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[rtb61]

As always force of habit is the major driver to keep using existing products. Especially considering M$ Outlook was better known as M$ Lookout for routine failures and data loss in the nineties, it is rather more reliable now. Getting accustomed to all the features of a calendering and scheduling program takes a reasonable effort, especially if you really want to make full use of it, unless there is a major reason to change, why would you.

The other perspective is, force your employees to use you deficient product and they will work at reducing those deficiencies and make a better product available to your customers.

Calendering and scheduling is in transition as it is disappearing as a PC or notebook program and shifting to being a smartphone only program, for obvious reasons. There is still server side functions but the big US server side companies have a real permanent taint of the NSA/CIA hanging over them now and as such, local files are going to become much more popular again.

Even US security software is going to come under some serious review, after all fifty thousand hacked networks and not one squeak from any, and I repeat not any, US in-security software and we can all guess exactly why. US servers, US software are all going to become don't touch.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[ahabswhale]

I've used Outlook nearly my entire career and I don't see anything about it that makes it especially well suited to corporate use (at least as a user). In fact, I've never enjoyed using it. It's a mediocre product companies seem to use for the simple reason that nobody is going to get fired for picking Outlook. My guess is that these employees are just used to it and people hate change. I've never worked with anyone that's ever praised Outlook.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[phantomfive]

She must be doing something right. Suddenly every news outlet seems to have a spy trying to figure out what the company is doing, and we keep getting Slashdot articles about Yahoo. From a sheer publicity perspective, she's a genius (or the board is a genius for choosing her).

Re:Wagging the dog.

[turp182]

"section of users with multiple e-mail clients to keep an eye on the competition"

Lotus Notes baby!!!! (and Outlook)

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Dahamma]

If my dog digs a hole in the yard, I sometimes shovel some of his poo in before filling it. Works pretty well, he doesn't want to go near it (otherwise he just considers it a game and digs the hole back up). I used to throw in some cayenne pepper, but now I think he's acquired a taste for that...

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

Take outlook away, and see if anyone praises it. The killer app is not outlook, it is outlook + calendar integration, which is superior to all.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

Only dogs do that!

On Yahoo! Mail, no one knows you're a dog.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[red crab]

Really? I thought Yahoo! has always been in news, even before Mayers took over it, always for the wrong reasons; this piece of news being no exception.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[phantomfive]

Yeah, why does Yahoo manage to get in the news so much? It's not like they are the only company that doesn't "eat their own dog food."

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Charliemopps]

Another reasonable approach from might be to task, "How does our service need to change, in order for our own employees to want to use it?"

But they're right. The fact that most corporations STILL use outlook has more to do with the psychology of the staff than the actual utility of the application. Outlook sucks ass compared to even the most rudimentary webmail options out there. You have to pay for outlook! Yet any competent IT shop should be able to implement just about any open source web based mail app in a matter of weeks. Why pay millions to Microsoft when there are Free, better alternatives.

Lastly, maybe shes thinks that her staff will never be able to improve their software if they are not actually using it.

Re: Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

> big US server side companies have a real permanent taint of the NSA/CIA hanging over them now and as such, local files are going to become much more popular again.

No. No they're not. The days of having your data stuck on a single computer are over.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[swillden]

If I was at Google I would strenuously object to doing all my documentation by using Google Docs, or read mail via Google Mail, even if I was working on those products to make them better.

If you were at Google you'd know that Google Mail is the only realistic way to deal with the massive flood of e-mail that you would receive. Seriously, the automatic sorting and filtering available in Gmail, especially the phenomenal ability of Priority Inbox to pick out the stuff that matters from the thousand+ e-mails per day I receive (including huge numbers from automated monitoring systems) is all that makes it possible for me to manage, and I'm far from a mail client n00b.

Of course, Gmail is also a lot of the reason I get so many e-mails. Everyone knows that you can't realistically read that much, especially not if you want to get anything else done. So why send it? Because everyone also knows that Gmail is great at archiving and searching. So everyone receives far more than they can handle and automatically archives off 99% of it, but can very quickly find anything that they later discover they needed to see.

In any case the typical Google e-mail flow and Gmail are highly co-adapted. It would be very hard to be productive at Google using anything else.

Similarly, Googlers also tend to really like using Google Docs for documentation, because work (especially engineering work) at Google is highly collaborative, and the benefits of the Docs collaboration tools far outweigh any limitations due to missing formatting features. Personally, I think the lack of formatting features enhances productivity, because people don't waste time trying to create beautiful documents, and instead focus on content.

Docs' real-time collaboration capabilities is especially useful in design reviews and planning meetings. Rather than having one person take notes on the decisions and then later update the doc for circulation, it's common that everyone in the room has the doc open in their laptop and makes updates on the fly. So, by the time the meeting is over, the doc is already updated, for simple changes, at least. Obviously there are issues that require someone to go away and think for a few hours, so those just get placeholders during the meeting "Sam is going to figure out how to scorple the flugs such that the frobnitz doesn't get mungled". And when Sam has figured it out, he updates the doc -- the only copy of the doc, no versioning and merging nightmares -- and everyone who cares gets e-mail notifications (yes this contributes to the e-mail flood).

If anything, I'd say that Gmail and Google Docs suffer from being too narrowly tailored to the needs of Google employees. Of course there are usability studies and lots of data collected from the hundreds of millions of non-Googler users, too, but stuff that causes headaches for the particular workflows of Googlers -- and especially Google engineers -- tends to get fixed the fastest, at least with the products Googlers use heavily for work.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[swillden]

I work at Google and I've never seen anyone here use anything besides gmail for corporate mail.

I know one who uses EMACS (Gnus, I think) for e-mail, but she's hardcore. And she still uses the web UI for many tasks.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's only two types of poop a dog will eat.

It's own and anything else's!

Re:Wagging the dog.

[PopeRatzo]

Yeah, why does Yahoo manage to get in the news so much?

Because they've got a lot of well-paid people whose job it is to get them in the news.

Welcome to the Press Release News Cycle.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[jbolden]

Funny enough I'm a very long time Yahoo mail user but I almost always use it with a rich client. What's good about Outlook:

a) Integrated calendars
b) Multiple integrated email accounts
c) Task management built in
d) Note taking built in

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Luckyo]

That's probably because gmail supports outlook, just tell it to fetch your email from pop.gmail.com:995 and you're golden.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[phantomfive]

Does Yahoo really have a better publicity team than other companies?

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Enry]

I don't use Outlook as a VCS either.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[PopeRatzo]

They're number 2, so they try harder.

(I don't know if you're old enough to get the reference).

Re:Wagging the dog.

[phantomfive]

I'm so young, can't you tell by my girlish figure? But Yahoo isn't number 2.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[LurkerXXX]

It's because everyone is so suprised they are still alive, and wondering what they are doing to make enough money to live.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[skids]

I've generally found the people who make more than occasional use of calandering features are the most unproductive ones. I could entirely live without calandering myself.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[HJED]

Because checking your email through a browser is far less efficient and harder to use then using a desktop client (especially with imap). Personally I use Thuderbird (which is missing features for corporate use)

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish you would tell some of my coworkers that. Some of them typically check it first thing in the morning and reply at 4:55 pm.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[splorp!]

Your dog craps both dog and cat poop? Weird...

Re: Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you want to include VBA code for automation or customization, in which case Google Docs blows goats.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

It wasn't merely "Lookout," it was "Look out!!!" Have to give it the proper sense of urgent warning against complete catastrophe, you know.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[davester666]

They are number 1 then?

Really, it's a tossup between whether they are piss or shit.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[phantomfive]

They are number 1 then?

No.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[93 Escort Wagon]

I'm old - I remember the Avis commercials.

But does Marissa?

Re:Wagging the dog.

[plover]

I've been told it's their ad platform that's making them their money. About the only thing I regularly use Yahoo! for is their OpenID services, which I really like for three main reasons: they're not Microsoft, they're not Apple, and they're not Google.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[plover]

Maybe they don't have that kind of time.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[ceoyoyo]

It's a native app instead of a shitty web app?

Outlook has to be the crappiest native mail client, but it's still a native app.

On the other hand, it could just be because Yahoo mail manages to be even worse. A guy at work today was just swearing at his yahoo mail giving another "server not available" error this morning. I'd ditch it too.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Electricity Likes Me]

Worth noting is I don't know of any one who's suitably solved all of these cross-platform yet either.

I [i]still[/i] can't have calendar events and tasks live side-by-side in Google Calendar, nor a decent Tasks app on my phone (iOS, Android, any platform pretty much). Same story with notes and synchronizing them anywhere useful.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[bemymonkey]

" Calendering and scheduling is in transition as it is disappearing as a PC or notebook program and shifting to being a smartphone only program, for obvious reasons. "

Is this why smartphone calendar apps still can't set repeat patterns more complex than X weekdays every week? Take Google Calendar, for instance - the Android version only allows about a quarter of the repeat patterns available in the online version.

Yes, the smartphone is increasingly important for calendar use, but any time you're entering a whole bunch of data at once, you're not going to want to do it on your smartphone...

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm beginning to think thats the only way I'm going to avoid giving out my phone number. Ive already been locked out of one account as a result of using the web interface. In the old days google would have called their method for getting my phone number phishing. something about using my account from unfamiliar location.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

with you there, often it simply doesn't work (Chrome on the Mac).

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

They could just make them eat their own dog shit the same way IBM makes their employees use Lotus Notes and all the other awesome software IBM makes.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[firex726]

They hardly need spies to get copies of memos which talk about "eating their own dog food" to employees.
It'd be news if such a memo wasn't forwarded around within seconds of being read.

It's less about wanting to know what is being done right, and more about the morbid curiosity of watching a train wreck happen.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[rtb61]

Entering a whole bunch of data has very little to do with keeping a whole bunch of data. So remote software for a PC to enter and edit the contents of a smartphone either via wireless or USB would be very useful, in the case of calendering being able to carry it with you 24/7 makes it far more worthwhile and keeping a copy of the PC redundant other than as backup up or the main data entry point.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[antdude]

How about your poo?

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

Too true. Softmaker makes an office suite with an integrated Outlook-compatible mail client that cost $79 at list price and does not require annual fees. Sometimes it goes on sale. I left M$ long ago.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[mwvdlee]

For startes, having a relatively easy way to migrate is probably key to having people switch.
Some people value having a history of emails to reference and search when needed.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[bickerdyke]

perhaps. but those companies usually produce ACTUAL dog food.

I've yet to see a car company that use their competitors cars as company cars or don't encourage employees into buying them with huge discounts

Re: Wagging the dog.

[bickerdyke]

Why would you want to use VBA if you could use Apps Script instead?

(Yes, Google Docs HAs a built in scripting language, too)

Re:Wagging the dog.

[bickerdyke]

Same goes for MS Office.

Googel Docs at least has a built in version history and document sharing, so you even get the (very) basic VCS for free.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[bickerdyke]

That was my line of thought until I started to use GMail. First, as an option when I was not on my desktop machine. But I got used to it and didn't re-install my mail client at the next windows re-install. Don't miss one till today.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[TheRaven64]

How do you know if your employees like it if they don't use it? It's a big part of the reason for this kind of mandate: you have a large pool of people internally who can tell you if the product sucks, but only if they actually use it.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[TheRaven64]

MS Office also has change tracking and can show you who made which changes to a document. It works well, except if you have more than one document, in which case tying versions together is very hard. Oh, and there's no merging support, so you can't have two people independently editing a document. Oh, and you can't split documents up for different people to work on different sections, because then cross-references break. But that's probably okay, because no enterprise actually has more than one employee or one document....

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

pop?

Re:Wagging the dog.

[xaxa]

I use Thunderbird (unofficially) at work. It has instant full-text searching through all emails, and a great search interface. It's impressed a few colleagues, who are all using Outlook.

When I installed it, I expected nothing to have changed since I'd last used it properly, in about 2008, and was pleasantly surprised.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[bickerdyke]

Yes. It would work well if the standard operating procedure wouldn't be mailing copies of documents around - because &%$&"!-Outlook it's so easy to do with Outlook! Thatnks for the integration....

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

if I was creating a product intended for people with average to low technical aptitude (twitter)

What?! https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack etc

Re: Wagging the dog.

[jsepeta]

it's as if Outlook stabbed Yahoo Mail to death and left a bloody glove at the scene of the crime. I especially like the typos and the fact that the CIO admits there's still things that Outlook does better, so you can use it for 30 seconds. Who has time to keep swapping between programs just because the CIO is butthurt? deliver a better product that employees Want to use.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

It could work at Yahoo then.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Chickenlips]

Actually, Yahoo's news section is the most popular in the U.S., followed by CNN. It has been since before Mayer took over.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=247205097

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Geeky]

I'm using Wunderlist for tasks and Evernote for notes, but I'm happy to use separate applications for each. The gmail calendar is good enough for me as I don't get out much :)

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Talderas]

The OEM car manufacturers certainly do offer a discount and it's not just to their employees. They also offer it to a number of their suppliers and customers.

The better question is why would I buy a new car with the OEM discount when I could just get a 1 year old used car that's cheaper than what I would get a new one for?

The best part is how employees who, for example, drive a Ford to work at GM get treated as second class citizens by union members.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[AvitarX]

The spreadsheet is pretty weak too, I use it for simple things, especially when the sharing is useful (like expense reports), but it has frustrations even then. For example, when inserting a row it doesn't extend formulas to said row, and I've not found a way to copy a value from a cell that is the result of a formula.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo sending a memo to its employees urging them to use its mail product should be about as effective as if they sent the memo to strangers. The product is either appealing or it is not. If only 25 percent of Yahoo employees use it, perhaps its Yahoo that is not getting the message.
FG

Re: Wagging the dog.

[PopeRatzo]

Or, it's as if Outlook put a hand axe into the forehead of Yahoo Mail and then put it's head on a pike, and now the Princess Mayer is saying "Winter is coming" while Yahoo employees dally with the daughters of Lord Ballmer in the upstairs rooms of Silicon Valley ale houses.

Or something.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

And then you give it a big wet sloppy kiss. Or maybe you're not one of those dog owners. They gross me out.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

I similarly know a few who use Thunderbird and even one who uses Outlook still. e.g, no one is told to use Gmail, the vast majority CHOOSE to, which is the whole point.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

I would never trust my employer with my confidential emails, I dont see why anyone would.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[nine-times]

Well of course, it may be that you can't get a good answer to that question until your employees use it enough to formulate complaints.

One of the key factors in the idea of "eating your own dog food" is to be responsive to feedback from those eating the dog food. The idea is that, if you're using your own product then you have both a better understanding of what needs to be changed and a greater motivation to change it. The problem with some "eat your own dog food situations" is sometimes the directive down from the boss is not "eat our own dog food and tell us how to improve it," but instead "eat our own dog food and you had better like it!"

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should the employees want to use it? "Eat your own dogfood" is a bad idea for your employees, unless you are creating a product intended for those types of employees. Is Yahoo Mail intended to be a corporate mail solution? If so then the employees should be encouraged to use it. If instead it is intended to be a general purpose web mail service, then it may be inappropriate for work.

Similarly, if my company made catheters I most certainly would object to be asked to use one while at work! Similarly, if I was creating a product intended for people with average to low technical aptitude (twitter, facebook) I would strongly object to be required to actually use that product all the time (I'd use it for testing purposes only). If I was at Google I would strenuously object to doing all my documentation by using Google Docs, or read mail via Google Mail, even if I was working on those products to make them better.

People are not cookie cutter clones!

They did, um, mention that the employees were encouraged to use the "corporate version of the webmail service". Good for you for drawing the line at using a catheter at work though. Here's a medal. More to the point, the users are no doubt simply comfortable with what they have, and like most PC users (certainly in the general population, not amongs us turbogeeks here at slashdot) they look at change and first ask "why?" and if the reason is not compelling, they simply don't.

A slightly more appropriate analogy would be General Motors requiring everyone to drive a GM car. Surely, there is a GM car for just about everyone (since they make a full range, from compacts to trucks) but would every employee feel compelled to sell/park their current car in favor of one? Of course not, to most people switching cars is a hassle.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

.. I sincerely hope you're not committing MS Word docs into your repos. There are tons of plaintext formats you could use.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially considering M$ Outlook was better known as M$ Lookout for routine failures and data loss in the nineties, it is rather more reliable now.

I know several Windows admins that raise their family on the many repeated failures of Outlook + Exchange. They make good money rebuilding databases from backups for when Exchange inevitably goes tits up. Meanwhile my postfix servers just chug along, handling thousands of emails an hour, without even a restart in over 3 years.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

What Yahoo(!) should really be asking is: what is it about Outlook that keeps people using it?

Simple, I can answer that for you and I don't even work at Yahoo (or use their corporate mail): Outlook is "already figured out" meaning no learning curve: no hackneyed attempts at moving calendars, archived mail, tasks, etc just to get back to doing work; instead the employees have (rightly, IMO) chosen to just keep working. Remember, Yahoo! is a normal company that happens to be technology oriented, so most of their employees (everyone but the 25% who gladly switched, I bet) are regular accountants, HR managers, sales drones, marketers, graphic designers, and the like. The question Yahoo! should be asking is: "why do we want all of our employees to use our email service, and how much is it worth to us?" Retraining regular employees (regular folks, not slashdot turbogeeks who love playing with new apps and sites) is not free, so there will be a pricetag for pushing all users off of outlook.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[unixisc]

Another reasonable approach from might be to task, "How does our service need to change, in order for our own employees to want to use it?"

Precisely!!! Every other service has a seamless way to let e-mail clients work w/ them - gmail, aol, live/hotmail; it's only Yahoo! that makes it difficult. If they just made Yahoo work smoothly w/ Outlook/Thunderbird/____, things would be so much easier.

One thing they could try out - making Yahoo! something that would allow people to recall mails. That's a neat feature in every employer of mine that had MS Exchange.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[unixisc]

I'm not exactly following this argument. People can use Gmail on Outlook or Thunderbird - one just has to configure it initially - Thunderbird tends to self configure. One issue w/ Yahoo! mail is that it is POP only, not IMAP, so that one could risk all the mails being stuck on one device, instead of being on the server for any.

In other words, it's apples vs pineapples. One is an e-mail client software, while another is a webmail service. The 2 can be used w/ each other - that's what I do all the time. On Thunderbird, I use 5-6 e-mails that I have and always know what's going on w/o having to open browsers & logging into different tabs.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just be thankful you're not using Lotus Notes!

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I've worked in an office for some time, and I can tell you why I would still use outlook over webbased mail. No matter the provider.
First. I can kill outlook anytime and still surf the web anytime I like.
Second. I can set outlook to check for mail at large intervals, with webbased I get notified within seconds of it being sent. That is a pain in the ass if you want some free time. Basically you can receive mails every few minutes, needing to take time to read every one, instead of getting groups every 15 minutes.
Third. It's interface doesn't change very much, unlike webbased that seem to try a new look every single year.
Fourth. I use the browser to browse the internet and the mail client to receive/send mail. Getting them crossed is irritating to most people.
Fifth. I, like a lot of people know how to use the internet, know how to write software, work with tech all day, but don't want to relearn basic skills over and over. You hear about those people who do everything from the command line, or the opposite side of the same coin, people trying to do everything in the browser. All for the same reason.

Sixth ... most people go to work for the paycheck. Yes, there are those people that corporation love, who go to work and consider the paycheck a nice perk, living there 90 hours/week, but those people are rare (mostly because the strain, sooner or later, breaks their minds or bodies).

Re:Wagging the dog.

[PrimaryConsult]

I used to not care about the calendar, but if you end up involved with a lot of projects, it's impossible to live without.

As for occasional versus extensive use of the calendar, people who don't block of time they're out of the office often get meetings scheduled while they're out. And then penalized for missing the meetings. Not official penalization, more "we made this decision about changes that are technically in your area but since you were not at the meeting we didn't think you'd mind. It's already been green lit by management, have fun!"

Re:Wagging the dog.

[mcgrew]

I use them too, and I couldn't agree with you more. Their web interface is so bad I don't check my mail with it, I use my phone. Half the emails I get I can't read in their web interface without a god damned horizontal scroll with every line.

I should set up Thunderbird or something on the notebook.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's interface doesn't change very much, unlike webbased that seem to try a new look every single year.

Bingo.

My job uses email as a tool. My job is not to be a UX designer's guinea pig. My job is not to be relearning how to use the same tool every time some webdev wants to play with something new. My job is not to provide job security for webdevs.

Email is done. It's been figured out. It's a solved problem. Whether your solution is /bin/mail, elm, pine, mutt, Outlook or Thunderbird, it doesn't need to be redesigned every six months.

It's a tool, not a fashion show. Sometimes I think we in the IT industry have forgotten this.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[swillden]

The AC's point is important, though: the fact is that the webmail interface is so good that essentially all Googlers use it, even though it's easy to use something else.

Pretty much everyone just keeps gmail tab open all the time, usually pinned.

Re:Wagging the dog.

[swillden]

I know one who uses EMACS

but she's hardcore

How was this not marked troll?

Because it's not the slightest bit trollish?

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

no but they are more evil than 2 of the others on that list (no-one is more evil than some fruit based company)

Re:Wagging the dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

How can they get those requirements, if people won't try it?

"Eating your own dog food" is more than just a substitute for hiring a few BAs. It gives you instantaneous, high-quality feedback, and even more importantly, it gives it continuously. Every change you implement is felt by your own staff first.

Web Apps

[the eric conspiracy]

Aren't the best solution to everything.

Re:Web Apps

[Arker]

Very true.

And while Outlook is very near worst of breed for email - yahoo webmail is not just webmail, it's probably the worst webmail available.

I dont blame their employees for not wanting to use it, I have used a yahoo email since just after they first went online, but I dont even bother log into it anymore after the last batch of forced regressions involved in their redesign.

On the one hand, if they dont use it, it obviously will never be fixed. They clearly dont listen to customer feedback in any way shape or means. But then again, why would they listen to their employee feedback either?

More than likely a lot of those employees actually DID respond to the request to eat that dogfood, gave it a try, found out it tastes as bad as it looks and is unlikly to ever be fixed no matter what the employee feedback - and therefore rationally went back to Outlook.

Re:Web Apps

[InsightfulPlusTwo]

Yeah, why doesn't Yahoo! just make some desktop client software that integrates with their WebMail and has Outlook-style features?

People use outlook?

[gijoel]

I think most of Yahoo's problems stem from the fact that the hire programmers that use Outlook?

Re:People use outlook?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, tons of people use Outlook. It's leaps and bounds better than Yahoo mail or any duct-taped together, freetard solution.

Re:People use outlook?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have Outlook inflicted on me by my employer.

It's marginally better than Yahoo mail, but that doesn't mean it's not an old, clunky dinosaur that _should_ be long defunct.

Re:People use outlook?

[Darinbob]

Most companies essentially mandate the use of Outlook and have MS Exchange as their back end.

As bad as Outlook is, it's still better than any webmail solution.

Re:People use outlook?

[su5so10]

Most companies... except for IBM which mandates Lotus Notes. Which is the worst email program I've ever used (outside of BSD Mail).

Re:People use outlook?

[sexconker]

I think most of Yahoo's problems stem from the fact that the hire programmers that use Outlook?

Outlook is terrible.
It's still leaps and bounds better than any other option for a workplace.

Re:People use outlook?

[DeathElk]

Ballmer, shut the fuck up. You're meant to be enjoying retirement.

Re:People use outlook?

[Anonymous Coward]

by sexconker (1179573) Foe of a Friend on Tuesday November 26, 2013 @10:24AM (#45521559)

I think most of Yahoo's problems stem from the fact that the hire programmers that use Outlook?

Outlook is terrible.

It's still leaps and bounds better Ihan any other option for a workplace.

by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26, 2013 @09:41AM (#45521113)

Yes, tons of people use Outlook. It's leaps and bounds better than Yahoo mail or any duct-taped together, freetard solution.

Trolling as AC as well, I see?

Re:People use outlook?

[hairyfish]

I'll go one further and say Exchange/Outlook is better than anything other app in it's class. I always hear people bashing Exchange/Outlook in here, but I never hear anyone say product x does it better. For Enterprise Email/Contacts/Tasks/Calendar/Collaboration the closest product is Lotus Notes and that truly sucks arse. So before you label me a shill, I'd like to hear about your replacement candidate. I have no connection to MS, I've just been down that path of finding competition and found nothing but donkeys (in this space).

Re:People use outlook?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's marginally better than Yahoo mail, but that doesn't mean it's not an old, clunky dinosaur that _should_ be long defunct.

And replaced by what?

Re:People use outlook?

[Anonymous Coward]

yes the usage of the term "leaps and bounds better" in two posts can only mean that the two post *must* have been authored by the same person.

Re:People use outlook?

[King_TJ]

Yeah, this is unfortunately quite true.

Our company would LOVE to migrate everyone away from Outlook and Exchange for multiple reasons. First and foremost, it encourages the use of the email system as an all purpose filing system, yet turns around and imposes severe limits on the number of objects it can handle before performance degrades and functions simply quit working properly. (I believe the speed and memory capacity of the client have some bearing on what the limit is for a particular user, but I've often heard recommendations to keep it under 1,000 or so objects per folder. That may sound like a lot until you realize people often have more than that in their Outlook calendar alone, if they've worked for the company for 4 or 5 years and never thought to try to delete any scheduled appointments or entries that happened in the past. Not only that, but recurring entries, such as "schedule my staff meeting every Wednesday at 1PM through the end of 2015" create separate entries for EACH occurrence!)

Regardless, there's really not much of anything out there that's provably better. Zimbra looks interesting as a possible web-based alternative? But mostly, people really like all of this data stored (or at least cached) locally on the computer running the client, for fast access and ability to work with everything even when offline. Combine that with the functionality Outlook/Exchange provides -- and it's a tall order to match or beat it with another product.

Re:People use outlook?

[bickerdyke]

Which makes sense. In this combination!

Re:People use outlook?

[xaxa]

Ah, that probably explains why Outlook at work hangs for two minutes after I load it. Thank you! I had installed Thunderbird in frustration (which is better than the version of Outlook we use, it has instant full-text search) and was using my phone for managing appointments.

Kolab and the associated KDE clients are decent, but it's been a long time since I tried them out properly. I hadn't heard of Zimbra. (This stuff is not my area at all.)

Re:People use outlook?

[ulricr]

I'm always baffled when people complain that Outlook is slow. The corporate exchange server I am connected to is not even in the same country as I am. And outlook starts in about 7 seconds in a cool boot (ho often do you that, once a week?). That's still too long, but it's not 2 minutes. My mail is all on the server, no local .ost file. (probably the same for you too, since you switched to an (no longer developed afaik) imap client) But there are some crazy corporate spyware/management stuff that corporation install on our PCs that slow things down, and for sure "going rogue" and using another mail client that is not IT-managed works around that.

Re:People use outlook?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google Apps is just as good if not better than the Exchange/Outlook combo

Re:People use outlook?

[Anonymous Coward]

As good as Google Apps? Bullshit.

Re:People use outlook?

[Lorens]

TFA quotes the e-mail:

In the rare case you do need Outlook, like adding a delegate for your calendar, you can still fire up Outlook for 30 seconds.

Is that feature so important that it has to mentioned? It certainly doesn't seem like it should be months of work to add it to the in-house webmail client if Outlook can do it! I'd certainly press for having the feature added to the in-house solution *before* sending out an e-mail lambasting employees for not using it!

What I find really funny is that Zimbra belonged to Yahoo, and Zimbra definitely can add a delegate to a calendar.

Re:People use outlook?

[Flere Imsaho]

Can confirm. Source: Notes user :-(

Re:People use outlook?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm the IT guy for an engineering firm, and we migrated from Outlook/Exchange to Zimbra. It's great, does everything we need it to and trucks along with minimal intervention. Plus the beancounters love the fact that it's free - we use the community edition.

Been using it for over a year now and would never go back to Exchange.

Re:People use outlook?

[rdnetto]

What are your thoughts on KDE Kolab?

Re:People use outlook?

[shutdown -p now]

yet turns around and imposes severe limits on the number of objects it can handle before performance degrades and functions simply quit working properly. (I believe the speed and memory capacity of the client have some bearing on what the limit is for a particular user, but I've often heard recommendations to keep it under 1,000 or so objects per folder.

I'm not sure which version you're using, but I haven't noticed anything of a kind with Outlook 2010 or 2013 (and whatever Exchange is running on the server side), and I have an archive of email going back 5 years, for a total of 10 Gb. And while I also have plenty of folders, vast majority of them certainly have well in excess of 1k objects in them.

What the hell is IN that dogfood?

[themushroom]

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.

I think that dogfood's gone bad and grown some mushrooms. Also, how does a T-Rex imitate a Pterodactyl... flapping its little arms vainly?

Rawr.

Re:What the hell is IN that dogfood?

[rk]

I read that all and in my mind filled in the words: "Still better than Yahoo web mail." Like someone else said here, instead of mandating the employees switch, they might want to spend a little time finding out why their employees won't, because unlike her Yahoo minions, Mayer can't tell anyone else what email client to use.

Re:What the hell is IN that dogfood?

[PPH]

Never mix your metaphors before they've hatched.

Re:What the hell is IN that dogfood?

[ApplePy]

Mixing metaphors is like beating dead horses into plowshares. Don't do it.

Re:What the hell is IN that dogfood?

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole thing is bizarre. It's T. rex not "T-Rex". Tyrannosaurus rex was a pretty successful species in western North America, judging by its wide distribution. And similar species existed in Asia as well. It's "tiny" arms were small in comparison to the size of the rest of its body and head, but still large and strong in an absolute sense (they are a metre long). When you've got a head that huge and weigh 6 or 7 tonnes, who needs arms anyway? Modern birds do just fine without arms, having swapped them for wings.

And pterodactyls were sometimes small. Other times they were the size of a small plane. Quetzelcoatlus had a wingspan of 10m or so and was a contemporary of T. rex.

Yeah, I don't know what's in that dogfood, but they need to learn more about dinosaurs and their contemporaries before trying to explain it with an analogy, because that one is whacked.

Re:What the hell is IN that dogfood?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Are they a fan of Dino-Train? I otherwise just don't get the tiny T-Rex and Pterodactyl reference. Even if that's what they're referencing, wtf do they have against Dino-Train that they compare it to NT Server?

Re:What the hell is IN that dogfood?

[the_olo]

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.

I think that dogfood's gone bad and grown some mushrooms. Also, how does a T-Rex imitate a Pterodactyl... flapping its little arms vainly?

I think that now we can see clearly, where ~BadAnalogyGuy has gone to...

Dinosaur Train!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure Dinosaur Train didn't come out in the 90's despite the graphics looking like it did.

Re:Dinosaur Train!

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 (Gets the in-joke). Fistbump of solidarity, from one parent to another.

Calendars

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Yahoo mail do calendaring and task management? Does it do it well? That's the killer app for businesses with Outlook.

Re:Calendars

[Chas]

Also, can you easily sync the calendar and contacts to your phone the way you can with Outlook?

*Note: I said EASILY! So your 75-step "here's how you do'er" can be consigned to the circular file.*

Personally, I don't use Outlook myself. I don't care for the client.
However, I only use webmail when I don't have access to my phone or one of my computers (see "seldom, if ever").

Also, please tell me how I peruse my old e-mail when my internet connection goes down or the provider has a service outage for a webmail app.

As functional as webmail and web-office apps are, they're still little more than toys.

Re:Calendars

[skids]

Also, please tell me how I peruse my old e-mail when my internet connection goes down or the provider has a service outage for a webmail app.

I have a hard enough time doing that in outook when the network is up and running smoothly.

Seriously, 10 minutes to search an inbox with just a few tens of thousands of emails in it? I pretty much have to keep both outlook and OWA open so I can use each to work around the serious deficiencies of the other.

Re:Calendars

[Chas]

Well, 10,000-to-90,000+ e-mails?
Yeah, I can see that taking time.
Flat-filing it takes more time due to extensive disk access.
Reducing it to SQL and blobs takes more time due to query limits for performance's-sake.
Think about it.

An average e-mail is somewhere between 25KB and 75KB.
That works out to about 2300-7000 words in plaintext.
Now think about 20,000 of them in a single inbox.
Now think about 80,000 of them in a single inbox.

This is why users of solutions like Outlook are encouraged to use archiving.

Re:Calendars

[Anonymous Coward]

" just a few tens of thousands of emails".. Jim, is that you?

Re:Calendars

[SpzToid]

I use google calendar and gmail, (and Google Domains for Business, grandfather-style for free, along with my own domain). My Nokia N9 uses the Exchange API for syncing, to compliment the browser interfaces for these services.

Meeting notifications and confirmations just work, no matter which device is being used.

One might consider the privacy issues, but for ease and reliability, google is doing it for me, free.

Re:Calendars

[xaxa]

I only have 2500 emails in my Exchange inbox, but found Outlook was struggling -- possibly we have an old version, I'm not sure.

I like Thunderbird's Full Text Search, and now use Thunderbird for 95% of the emails I send. It has a threaded email view, a bit like GMail, which I also prefer. I still use Outlook (or my phone) for my calendar.

I don't know how it would cope with 10,000s of emails. The initial import would take a while.

Re:Calendars

[skids]

This is why users of solutions like Outlook are encouraged to use archiving.

Sooooo 80's. I want my mail client to save me work, not create busywork for me.

Microsoft Outlook is like capitalism

[Qzukk]

The worst possible email client, except for all the rest.

Re:Microsoft Outlook is like capitalism

[Swampash]

Democracy.

http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/364.html

Re:Microsoft Outlook is like capitalism

[laederkeps]

Mutt.
All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.

Re:Microsoft Outlook is like capitalism

[mcgrew]

The first five words were accurate. I've used a lot of different email clients and we're stuck with Outlook at work now. I fucking hate it. Of all the email clients I've used, IMO Outlook is the worst, PERIOD.

I miss the Novell client.

But it's still better than Yahoo webmail. Any dedicated email client is better than webmail.

web mail for enterprise?

[Joe_Dragon]

web mail for enterprise?

Re:web mail for enterprise?

[Ralph Wiggam]

Gmail has been pretty successful.

Re:web mail for enterprise?

[silas_moeckel]

So is outlook for that matter. Outlook has inertia piles of it, Plenty of companies rolled it out as there first email and people have never know anything else.

Re:web mail for enterprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

outlook has many problems, but there currently isn't a better solution in the market in either proprietary or free software that is better. when combined with exchange the calendaring and scheduling plus office integration make far and away the best solution in the market, which is sad because it really does have so many shortcomings.

Re:web mail for enterprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

So is outlook for that matter. Outlook has inertia piles of it, Plenty of companies rolled it out as there first email and people have never know anything else.

At least it has grammar checking.

Re:web mail for enterprise?

[Lifyre]

I work as support for a large number of small businesses and honestly it doesn't work very well there either. Every company we've worked with that had more than 5 people weren't happy with it for one reason or another. A very very large reason is having to have an internet connection unless you use a third party app (such as Outlook) or Chrome.

Re:web mail for enterprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

Works great at my place. And it even makes it easy for someone to use a mail client on their own machine.
Actually at my work we banned Microsoft products for most use cases except for testing, and I that's made everything so much easier to administer and support.

Re:web mail for enterprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. Gmail and Gapps for business works great for small companies that don't value their privacy, but they simply don't scale to the needs of an enterprise. It's not that it's not a good product (it's just OK) it is that Outlook is VASTLY more mature. Basic stuff like task management just doesn't exist, the groupware functions aren't very good, and it doesn't like to be open all day long. The sharepoint and MS Office integration is basically perfect in Outlook, and Google office apps are toys. Google for business isn't awful, but web apps just don't work ergonomically for your typical knowledge worker.

Re:web mail for enterprise?

[su5so10]

One area where gmail is infinitely better than Outlook is search speed. Which is important in an enterprise setting, e.g. when trying to find details about design discussions from months ago.

Re:web mail for enterprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

Outlook is PART of MS Office, so the integration should be pretty good, but for products made by the same company Outlook and SharePoint are pretty much a pain in the ass together. Calendars don't smoothly integrate, tasks only sync if you have 2013 (for both). And heaven help you if you have multiple URLs for the same content.

Re:web mail for enterprise?

[Krishnoid]

'Outlook Web Access', aka Microsoft Exchange's web front-end, can provide much better search speed than the desktop client if the Exchange server is sufficiently powerful.

Re:web mail for enterprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is purely a configuration option, Yes a huge beefy server backend is better than a client side search. But if you configure outlook to search using exchange backend the search is just as quick as gmail. Still I would rather be able to search my email whether I am connected to the internet or not, so gmail still loses bigtime on search.

Re:web mail for enterprise?

[laffer1]

I work at the University of Michigan and we use Gmail and Google apps. I'm not a big Gmail fan, but it's actually not bad for business use.

There are still people trying to use outlook as their client, but most people prefer Gmail now. It can work for large organizations.

Re:web mail for enterprise?

[bickerdyke]

The sad thing is, many people think of it as a good (if not the only) EMAIL client, just it is the best (and probably indeed only) Exchange client.

Re:web mail for enterprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, did you mean to say "web mail for enterprise?"

I didn't get it the first time in the subject line, or the second time in the body. Perhaps you can repeat yourself again for me please?

It makes sense

[pmontra]

Maybe 75% of Yahoo's workforce want to work for another company.
Anyway, I understand why they should mandate using their own mail application and search engine. They'll discover quickly if those products hurt and they have an incentive to make them better.

Re:It makes sense

[Obfuscant]

They'll discover quickly that those products hurt and they have an incentive to make them better.

FTFY. Yahoo mail. Abysmal.

Every time I go there on the web, I am told to upgrade to a Firefox that has been optimized for Yahoo, and then I get told to pick a new theme. Every damn time.

At least the quality is consistently 'neo', both for groups and email.

Re:It makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if there are really good chanels of communication between various departments and the webmail development team. Doubtful such a thing exists in a company like Yahoo. It's not like the accounting department can fix the flaws in the software themselves. More likely the staff will grudgingly switch to Yahoo mail, silently put up with all its shortcomings and use MS Word to update their resume.

Re:It makes sense

[locopuyo]

I use Opera 12 and it briefly flashes the your browser is not supported before continuing. It also used to repeatedly ask me to choose a theme until I chose a theme using the yahoo mail app on my phone.
Yahoo mail used to be good and I actually preferred it over gmail until about 2 years ago. Every update it seems to get worse. There are tons of bugs that should have been found with any decent QA process.

Re:It makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes the page load time on groups calender is sad.
The usability of the mail system is likewise.

I wonder if their business plan is to be the next AOL?

cat turds are dogfood, according to many dogs

[themushroom]

Next analogy down the pike: Marissa in the corner, licking her own balls.

Re:cat turds are dogfood, according to many dogs

[steelfood]

Wait what? Doesn't that make Yahoo the cat that laid the turd? Cats aren't particularly known for licking their own or others balls, especially not for the hell of it. They certainly do lick each other though.

I don't think

[dale.furno]

I don't think I understood the latter half of the summary, can someone translate that to a car analogy?

Mail?

[JBMcB]

I'm sure the employee's reaction was the same as everyone else's: Yahoo still has email?

Re:Mail?

[Anonymous Coward]

it's what you use when you don't want special offers in your gmail

Re:Mail?

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually use Yahoo Mail and have done for over ten years. It's always seemed like a good idea to me since I'll never use Yahoo for anything else (what else do they really do anyway?) while if I were to use something like GMail they'd be cross-referencing my emails with my searching habits with my Youtube viewing history and general browsing habits from the many many websites that use Google Ads.

Better to spread my info around into (relatively) remote morsels so that no one organisation knows everything about me.

Re:Mail?

[chromas]

They were surprised to find out Yahoo is still around and that they work there.

Re:Mail?

[turp182]

My primary personal email has been a Yahoo account since sometime in 2000. Everyone I know has it, it is de facto (correct spelling anyone? a suggestion was "ed-facto").

I take the changes in stride, I only wish that the freaking mail item list was always associated with Arrow-Up/Arrow-Down. Am I always wanting to see my Sent Items or Deleted Items folders???

Re:Mail?

[m2]

Yes, Yahoo still has an email thing. I know exactly one person who still uses it. And pays for it.

When reading the summary, I was sure that this:

gently lambasting staff who refuse to part with Microsoft Outlook

... was going to read "gently lambasting staff who refuse to part with Gmail" and Yahoo was imploring their employees to switch to Yahoo! mail. As bad as Yahoo's mail system is, Outlook is worse. I figure 75% of Yahoo is sales people.

Re:Mail?

[pete6677]

You don't think Yahoo also plunders your personal information for corporate gain?

Re:Mail?

[Chryana]

Same situation here, and for the same reasons. I access my mail almost exclusively by IMAP in Thunderbird, so there would be no difference in the user interface if I switched to GMail (Plus, the security is better: Yahoo! still doesn't in this day and age support https access to its web interface. Terrible).

Re:Mail?

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here, all I want is an email address to be reached at, and for that Yahoo is sufficient.

I hate the level of cross integration Google does with Gmail, get enough requests to link the stuff I have let alone stuff my email provider will link up for me.

Re:Mail?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't think Yahoo also plunders your personal information for corporate gain?

Try reading what he wrote, it would probably help if you actually read what you replied to before replying.

Re:Mail?

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy gives the reason why he thinks it's an acceptable trade IN HIS DAMN POST.

Re: Mail?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, de facto is the correct spelling in Latin.

Re:Mail?

[Anonymous Coward]

Better to spread my info around into (relatively) remote morsels so that no privately-owned organisation knows everything about me.

FTFY

Re:Mail?

[mcgrew]

I can't agree. I agree that Outlook is the worst mail client I've ever used, but Yahoo webmail sucks worse. I got it over a decade ago to have a stable email address. I read my mail on the phone because Yahoo's interface won't let me read a lot of mail without side scrolling with every line on the computer. FAR worse than anything MS's client does. But I will be glad when I don't have to use Outlook next February when I retire (but more glad I'll be through with Access).

I should just install Thunderbird (but I should install kubuntu on the notebook, too).

Yahoo mail was recently ruined

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to love Yahoo, but they recently ruined it by removing the ability to have more than one message open at a time in separate tabs (there are no more tabs). They also now automatically thread all the emails with the same subject line, making it very difficult to know if you are replying with a lot of extra junk you don't want or not. You also cannot do something as simple as copying text or an address from one message to another (again, lack of tabs). I don't like their dog food anymore either.

Re:Yahoo mail was recently ruined

[Anonymous Coward]

The new Yahoo Mail is gorgeous. If you need tabs you can simply open your messages in a new browser tab, I really did not like the old way of having tabs inside browser tabs.

Re:Yahoo mail was recently ruined

[firex726]

Same here, I hate how it's all been linked into some instant messaging format. And god forbid you get emails regularly with the same subject.

snooping

[KernelMuncher]

So does Yahoo just want to snoop on all their employees ? By making them use their own email client they could do exactly that.

Re:snooping

[xombo]

They already run their own Exchange servers to power Outlook. There's nothing stopping them from snooping on corporate e-mail, no matter how you go about accessing it.

The second half of that summary was

[Kardos]

verbal diarrhea. Is the submitter sick from eating dog food?

Yahoo Dogfood is Bing

[PaddyM]

What is the point of this? When I log in to yahoo email it takes forever to search because the bing search takes forever to load. If you type too quickly, you just see your whole inbox. So they criticize their employees to leave outlook and use Yahoo mail?

Not that outlook search is any better (can't find parts of a word), but this whole dogfood is serious. Maybe they should stop using Windows at work or using Office while their at it.

News for who?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Microsoft Outlook, describing it as '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."

Individually the words make sense, but put them together and you can clearly see why Yahoo is where it is.

Re:News for who?

[firex726]

Yep, standard corporate buzzword speak for this kind of stuff.

When stuff like that gets sent out either the Exec is so full of themselves they think they are being clever, or their so ignorant they don't see how stupid it'll make them seem.

Right, Yahoo doesn't do search

[Animats]

Yahoo doesn't do search. They dumped the search engine years ago. Yahoo resells Bing, with Yahoo branding and ads.

Re:Right, Yahoo doesn't do search

[Anonymous Coward]

And in other news, Animats doesn't read comments he replies to.

Re:Right, Yahoo doesn't do search

[Anonymous Coward]

No need to be so vague! A better headline would have been: Animats commenting out of his ass as usual. Catch us next week- same Forum time, same Forum channel.

Billion Dollar Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Exchange has a lot of legacy plug-in type BS in the corporate space and is firmly entrenched as a result. Microsoft are very smart to this end: they've let Outlook Web Access remain a travesty of usability - it is horrible because they want to keep people on Outlook and therefore using Office (and mostly Windows).

If some, enterprising individual were to come along and build a real webmail front-end for Exchange, then you will usurp the next transition away from Microsoft.

I'll be your first customer.

Re:Billion Dollar Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Webmail sucks. No PGP, no local copies of my emails, no proper integration between cal, mail, and tasks.

It pays to have equal functionality on the client side and the ability to work offline. The philosophy of micro-thin client and mega-fat server ignores this.

Knowing what I know about corporate life...

[sootman]

... why do I suspect it'll be the managers who are the last to be dragged, kicking and screaming, from Outlook?

I use Yahoo mail and Outlook. Outlook definitely has its place, especially in a business. Tell me though, because I haven't looked: can Yahoo's calendar let you see everyone else's free time when inviting people to a meeting? As easily as Outlook does?

Re:Knowing what I know about corporate life...

[Anonymous Coward]

It can, if you have a proper calendar server set up. The problem is most places I've been don't or the end user doesn't click the button to do so because they don't know it is there and don't have that set up as the default view because they don't know they can.

Re:Knowing what I know about corporate life...

[acoustix]

It can, if you have a proper calendar server set up. The problem is most places I've been don't or the end user doesn't click the button to do so because they don't know it is there and don't have that set up as the default view because they don't know they can.

So, in other words: No, not by default. Outlook doesn't require user knowledge to set it up in a corporate environment with Exchange. It just runs and you are able to see other people's calendars when setting up an appointment. That is a huge advantage.

Who here wants to switch to another?

[BringsApples]

Email is just fucking email, all we want is to get messages from other people and respond. But since the powers that be have had their focus on setting things up to be so different, it's a pain in the ass to move things over. As if it's like that by design, hmm go figure.

Re:Who here wants to switch to another?

[asmkm22]

I think the idea is that by using their own products, their employees are in a better position to know what needs to be changed or fixed. Which makes sense.

Re:Who here wants to switch to another?

[BringsApples]

You're right, but that's not the point I'm trying to make. I'm just saying that the point that the article seems to be trying to make, "no one wants to change to Yahoo" is moot because no one wants to change from anything else, to anything else.

Re:Who here wants to switch to another?

[asmkm22]

And if these weren't paid employees, I'd agree with you. There's all kinds of things that employees in all industries don't *want* to do but are encouraged to. At least this one is more lenient with things (other than Apple, where anything but Apple products pretty much got you fired).

Re:Who here wants to switch to another?

[roc97007]

I think you've hit on a major point. "Differentiation" is part of the problem. What the customer (in this case -- the Enterprise employee) wants is efficient access to email. Not ads, not cute graphics and sounds, not fancy colors or fancy guis, just to be able to pound through a pile of emails and easily save, reply forward, and send/receive attachments in some reasonably efficient fashion.

My mom was at one time sold on some dumb-ass email service called "incredimail", because it spoke to her and had cute animations and supported putting those sickening kitten graphics and rich flowery formatting that just looks like garbage on non-incredimail clients. It was a pain in the ass to communicate with her. She finally gave up on the tool because it was causing problems for her and for all her relatives, and I managed to transition her to Yahoo Mail. The point is, it took her awhile to realize that there is a price for all those cute little proprietary features. Now she still has to deal with a gooey interface, but at least it's more straightforward and plays better with others.

Re:Who here wants to switch to another?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish they would stop using their own products and go back to the way it was ~2005 when yahoo mail was fast and didn't require so much javascript. yahoo mail these days is crap.

Re:Who here wants to switch to another?

[BringsApples]

Article:
Daaaamn, not even Yahoo employees want to use their email, it must suck.

Me: The point of this article is moot because it's got nothing to do with Yahoo's email sucking, it's that no one wants to change their email from where it is, and for a variety of reasons.

You: The article's point isn't moot because they get paid for working there. At least changing to Yahoo's email is optional unlike Apple.

You lost me. Why would their paycheck have any effect on them wanting to move their email to another carrier?

A more interesting move for Yahoo would be to only correspond to employees via a yahoo email account. That way everyone wins.

Re:Who here wants to switch to another?

[Bite The Pillow]

This is for business, not individuals. Business requires what Outlook offers because they grew up together. If its not easier to use for business it won't be used. Individual preference and migration inertia are irrelevant.
And its not just email. Calendars, ooo replies, org charts, room reservations, and more.

pot calling the kettle black

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't Yahoo also an anachronism of the 90s?

Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny thing is even management promotes using Google search at Yahoo! LoL

"Eat their own dog food?"

[PPH]

Clearly Marissa Mayer needs to study /b/ memes some more.

Obviously they can't find a decent alternative

[Trax3001BBS]

I don't know if YaHoo mail, Hotmail or Gmail is any good, I use Forte Agent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forté_Agent must copy and paste the é throws a loop.
and POP 3 my e-mail, everything to Gmail then to me. I use version Agent 1.93 (very old, very good).

I get no HTML mail, it's all in text unless I want to view it, I send no web beacons when
I read my mail. I send no it's been read replies.

It's the safest most secure e-mail system I've come across and been using it since Win 3.1.
None of my Email stays on a web service, and I have every email I've sent and received (for some reason).

Just saying YaHoo Pop 3 your email, you take the kool aide, yet they don't know of the outcome.
You use the YaHoo service but at your convince and in a secure fashion.

(Now I just hope Yahoo POP3's their Email, I got a Yahoo account when they were "Google" (before) but
never use it :} )

Re:Obviously they can't find a decent alternative

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if YaHoo mail, Hotmail or Gmail is any good, I use Forte Agent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forté_Agent must copy and paste the é throws a loop.
and POP 3 my e-mail, everything to Gmail then to me. I use version Agent 1.93 (very old, very good).

I used Forte Agent, too. In 1995. To download pr0n and warez.

Re:Obviously they can't find a decent alternative

[Anonymous Coward]

If I couldn't see your username, I would have sworn Joe Dragon typed this message because that amount of horrible grammar and spelling can only come from someone as stupid as he is. So either you are one of his alt astroturfing accounts or you have indeed exceeded Joe Dragon's stupidity. Good job bro.

Re:Obviously they can't find a decent alternative

[Trax3001BBS]

I used Forte Agent, too. In 1995. To download pr0n and warez.

Yep, nothing has changed.

Re:Obviously they can't find a decent alternative

[Anonymous Coward]

If I couldn't see your username, I would have sworn Joe Dragon typed this message because that amount of horrible grammar and spelling

Could you under stand it? that's all I care about. That a comma comes before an "and" or not has people like u fighting a each other, you can have it.

collect some requirements

[Dan667]

sheeze, how hard is it to realize your product does not do what people need and start a redesign project to go out and fix it?

domain specific software architecture or something ...

Right, but...

[roc97007]

> The message goes on to take a swipe at what appears to be Yahoo employees' preferred mail client, Microsoft Outlook, describing it as '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.'

Um, ok... and they're right, if a little too colorful, and it doesn't even mention Office 365, which has all the disadvantages of Outlook plus most the disadvantages of internet-based email (see below).

One can legitimately rag on Outlook, but that doesn't necessarily mean that Yahoo Mail is an adequate replacement. It lags, both in response and in sending/receiving. It requires the internet. It's not well integrated. The phone app is annoying. I've read recently that you now have to have a Plus (paying) account in order to use pop3. Web mail in general is too "mousy". It takes way too long to burn through a bunch of emails and do various disparate things to them. Web mail is cute and colorful, and moderately easy to learn, but it's not efficient. My mom uses Yahoo Mail. So does my wife. It's a good email tool for non-technical people who don't do a lot of email.

Let me repeat that, because I think this is the crux of the issue. Yahoo mail is a good email tool for non-technical people who don't do a lot of email.

My non-work email is from a service that includes pop3 support for 1/10 the yearly cost of an ad-free Yahoo Mail Plus account. I can access it via the generic Android email app or pop the messages to a "fat client" on my home machine, which can easily be operated entirely from the keyboard. A web interface is provided for emergencies, so I can still access email in a browser if I don't have access to my home machine or my phone. I maintain a Yahoo email account because my family uses Yahoo Messenger, but I rarely visit it because the web interface is slow and clumsy.

So yeah, I can see Yahoo employees being stuck between a rock and a hard place -- Outlook and Yahoo Mail, neither of which are optimal. At least with Outlook, they can still read their currently spooled messages if they lose connection to the outside world. Not to mention, carpel tunnel in the mouse hand from trying to do real work in a webmail interface.

Conversely, if the company absolutely, draconically required Yahoo Mail only, and did not allow any other mail tool to be used on pain of dismissal, this may lead to the tool becoming much improved. In a year or three, it might even be adequate for the Enterprise. If Yahoo didn't go under first. Email is kinda important to the business...

Re:Webmail is for idiots; Outlook is for morons

[dyingtolive]

RMS, what are you doing? You told us you didn't use the internet!

Be Taken Seriously

[TechyImmigrant]

No one takes you seriously if you have a Yahoo email, even if you work for Yahoo.

The Yahoo staff need Eudora to get things done.

Re: Be Taken Seriously

[Scowler]

As if there is any difference whatsoever between '@yahoo.com' vs '@gmail.com'. Anyone who claims such is too superficial to take seriously.

Re: Be Taken Seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a HUGE difference that you obviously aren't seeing. It's a common problem for old 6 digit guys like yourself so it's ok. GMail is the "in" thing right now. So a gmail address says that you are "current" and most likely keeping up with current technology. Someone that still to this day rocks a yahoo, hotmail, compuserve, or aol email address is obviously a Luddite. Sorry. Keep up with the times or fall to the wayside. I think that's something you old fogeys say. You know you're that way too. If you wandered over to a coworker's cube and spread out before you on the screen is a webpage being constructed in MS Frontpage, you'd instantly say to yourself: "God....Frontpage....this guy is a dumbass." Well when us kids are walking across your lawn, and hear you tell someone "rawkingrandpa46@yahoo.com" we laugh hilariously at your old ass right up until the moment you tell us to get the fuck off your lawn.

Eating dog food

[Livius]

I question whether any pet food manufacturers actually follow that philosophy.

Yahoo going downhill

[PoiBoy]

I had been a faithful Yahoo up until about six months ago. MyYahoo was great, and I liked the classic version of Yahoo Mail. Then Marissa Mayer came along and wrecked everything, adding bling and fancy colors while stripping away everything I liked about Yahoo, including the fact that I had it set up to look the same for about the past 10 years. I guess some people think it was time to spruce up the place. Not me. It's Mayer's Mayhem now.

well...that certainly will follow...

[schlachter]

what's the best way to motivate the yahoo mail team to improve their product? get a whole company of your peers to be irritated with the quality of your work and to offer constructive feedback.

I know why

[nitehawk214]

Its because they are paid as well as Wallmart employees and can't afford real food, right?

They borked yahoo mail this past update

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

I liked the old version where I could see every reply I got in its own thread. This new version forces all replies into a single thread, so if you get more than one reply, you might not see the new ones. I'm a fan of yahoo mail. I liked the last version best. Too bad you can't go back to it. Yahoo has been doing a lot of pointless upgrades on things that already work and don't need new functionality. They pissed off their fantasy sports people that way too. I think corporations know they can upgrade and regress software at the same time so they can get you to pay more for something you already had. I'm not saying yahoo is guilty of this. Otherwise it wouldn't be a forced upgrade, and you'd have your choice of mail clients.

Re:They borked yahoo mail this past update

[Anonymous Coward]

There is not a service Yahoo has "upgraded" after Queen Mayer became CEO on board that has been better post upgrade. I just quit using My Yahoo, and am definitely looking at alternative webhosting and mail choices now.

They had near perfection, but no sexy factor. Now they're pissing all that away to be hip.

no ulterior motives?

[Gravis Zero]

"YOU MUST USE OUR EMAIL SYSTEM! We promise we wont read your email. You trust us, right?"

two rules
1) never trust an employer unless you trust everyone in the entire company, including HR.
2) never trust HR.

Re:no ulterior motives?

[Ksevio]

They already use the corporate email server for corporate emails. They're just trying push them from using the Outlook client to the webmail client. I doubt "HR" has access to webmail, but not the email server.

Re:no ulterior motives?

[unixisc]

How about 'use your work e-mail for work purposes only and personal e-mail for personal'? With all the free webmail services out there, it's a piece of cake setting up the latter.

Wrong metric

[justthinkit]

The new Yahoo email is now able to serve ads to me, despite my 733KB hosts file, that change whenever I navigate anywhere in the interface. "Mission accomplished, ship it!"

Re:Wrong metric

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

Not seeing any ads with AdBlock Plus with the EasyList + EasyPrivacy filter sets even if I clicked to different messages or mailboxes -- and EasyPrivacy was busy blocking a new script every other second or so even several minutes after I opened the page. (Neither interferes with the site functionality AFAICT.)

If your browser might support it, you might want to consider supplementing that hosts file, if only for the privacy filtering.

Re:Wrong metric

[edibobb]

Why do those lists have so many ad companies white listed?

Re:Wrong metric

[noh8rz10]

did you try HOSTS FILE?

Re:Wrong metric

[justthinkit]

Thanks for the suggestions. When I looked at the links of the ads being served to me, they were to sites already blocked in my hosts file (i.e. if I had ever tried to click on them). The ads are text ads and the text is getting through perhaps because of javascript being on?

To Yahoo employees:

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a longtime Yahoo email user (10+ yrs). The most recent changes suck. I am migrating to GMail. Enjoy your dogfood.

Y Mail web interface is remarkably feature rich

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words it does exactly what outlook does, except poorly in a slow ass web2.0 single tasking interface, add onto the fact that yahoo is a spam whore and I dont want my company email interface having the front end blasting me with a full screen ad for "burning love" whats the sell here folks?

Re:Webmail is for idiots; Outlook is for morons

[Anonymous Coward]

I see many many people in this thread make the claim that there are better solutions out there, and yet everyone of them negelects to actually name them.

So put your money where your mouth is. Name some of these better products or just shut the hell up.

Obviously:

[Hartree]

The take away message is that Yahoo itself admits that at least 25% of their employees eat dog food.

I can't believe that's by choice. Even the most of the furries I know don't do that just for fun. (Well, maybe the occasional Milkbone with Gnutella)

Is their pay really that poor?

Wrong-o

[Anonymous Coward]

what's the best way to motivate the yahoo mail team to improve their product? get a whole company of your peers to be irritated with the quality of your work and to offer constructive feedback.

Nope. The best way to motivate the yahoo mail team is to require that one team's management chain, all the way to the CEO, to use no other mail client or mail service and cannot use non-public code versions ... and give everybody else leave to use any email client or service they wish.

When your boss, your bosses' boss and so on up the ladder have your product in their face 500 times a day then every issue about your product tends to get both attention and the resources needed to overcome the usual corporate obstacles. But that kind of thinking is one of the differences between Leadership and Management.

Dinosaur Train!

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, how does a T-Rex imitate a Pterodactyl... flapping its little arms vainly?

Rawr.

Clearly you are unfamiliar with Dinosaur Train and Buddy the T-Rex who was hatched into a family of Pteranodons. http://www.pbs.org/parents/dinosaurtrain/about/meet-the-characters/

The 90s

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one who finds it hilarious to hear yahoo speak of another company as producing an irrelevant product borne of the 90s? Yahoo is the only "portal" left... a uniquely 90s web concept.

Protecting themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

So that top management can't spy on them?

Couldn't get users even if you paid them

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't get users even if you paid them.

Re:Wagging the HOTMAILdog.

[deviated_prevert]

Actually, usually. Most dogs hate their own dog poo.

But they do love cat poo. Which in fact is probably a more apt analogy, anyway, because the new Yahoo Mail interface looks like they ate HotMail, had horrible indigestion, and then crapped out something vaguely resembling it.

There fixed that for you.

Webmail is a goddamn disaster.

[Entropius]

You don't always have internet access. Wifi doesn't work, people's authentication systems don't work. Sometimes you want to draft replies to people's letters on an airplane and send them when you land. In short, there are lots of reasons why you can't get to The Cloud to see your mail.

Mail is lightweight. Why *shouldn't* I store my mail locally, so I can get at it no matter what? What benefit do I get from using a webmail interface over an IMAP client?

Yes, I know that things like gmail offer imap access, and that's what I use. I completely understand why companies like Google are pushing "everything is inside the browser" -- it locks people in. But what I don't understand is why people are willing to go along with it.

Re:Webmail is a goddamn disaster.

[Geeky]

Unless you want to run your own server, internet available, it's a way to have access from wherever you happen to be. Web interface, phone... whatever, wherever.

I use gmail, download all of it to my PC inside Thunderbird for archiving, and get the best of both worlds. Permanent local copy, plus ready access to incoming mail on my phone when I'm out.

Re:Webmail is a goddamn disaster.

[Tarlus]

Same here. I very much prefer using a standalone mail client for a number of reasons. But at the same time, I really appreciate having webmail as a backup. Both have their niches and I would not be comfortable relying exclusively on just one.

Food?

[agapeton]

That's the wrong four letter word.

Re:Wagging the dog. (Yahoo - please read)

[Ralph Spoilsport]

I completely agree. I got my yahoo account (IIRC) back around 1997. It was fine then - always a bit clunky, but it always worked. Now, it just sucks. The colours are garish, and they've shifted to this idiotic "Tabbed" system which was innovative in 1999. And the tabbing is stupendously stupid. Example: If you route email to certain folders, it gets dumb. I route Facebook notices to a Facebook folder. I click the Facebook folder and the Inbox tab becomes the FAcebook tab. Which is stupid. Then I click on one of the notification emails from FB, and read it. It's not that important so I click the BACK button. What happens? I'm back in Inbox, yet my FB email is still in its tab. Rather than go back to the list of FB email, I got dumped back in Inbox. Grrrrr.

So I open up a bunch of FB notifications and they all appear in tabs. Once the horizontal of the tabs is filled, an arrow down tab appears, letting you access extra tabs, right? Wrong. It lists ALL the tabs, nd you have to scroll down to the end to find the most recent ones...

Now, over the years my eyes are not as good as they were, so I have to CTRL-+ a few times to be able to read stuff easily. So, the entire interface scales up and the stupid tabs and wasted space crowd out the text, leaving me with one or two lines of text to type into. Heck - I have the same mag here in slashdot, and I can see most of my post so far.

And then some times when I open Yahoo it barks at me that my screen res is too low (which is bullshit - it's 1920 x 1280 as usual).

And while I detest Google's threaded system, at least when you start typing someone's name in the search bar, it automagically finds the person you're looking for.

Yahoo would be better stripping down the UI - reduce the glitz and colours, ditch the tabbed UI, and just make something that WORKS.

Re:Wagging the HOTMAILdog.

[Dahamma]

I was actually thinking of saying "Hotmail" in my post, but I decided Gmail was in fact more accurate. It's so obvious from the design that Marissa Meyer basically said (like she probably does for all Yahoo decisions) "well, at *Google* we did THIS..." Unfortunately, the leftovers at Yahoo aren't even competent enough to properly copy Gmail...

Lulz...

[xpax666]

“Windows 95 called and they want their mail app back.” Hilarious. 1995 called, they want their search engine back! Where's Jerry when you need him?

No kidding.

[man_ls]

Yahoo's webmail is so bad, I finally got so frustrated with it I quit entirely.

And mind you: I've never used Yahoo webmail to actually receive e-mail. It was entirely unsuitable as nothing but a dummy e-mail account to receive automated task notifications at while testing software. I hate to think how it is if someone tries to use it for their actual e-mail.

Outlook, on the other hand, isn't actually that bad in my opinion. I (gasp) own a legitimate copy of it which I use with a my small business accounts.

internet portals

[Arker]

Actually there are quite a few of them left, AOL and practically every remaining ISP runs one.

Usually only the less technically literate ever see them, of course. But they exist, and make a profit by selling ads and putting as little as possible into maintaining them.

I'm A Loser, Baby

[Ukab the Great]

"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"

If I was a Yahoo employee and read this memo, I would assume it would mean the company was desperate enough to hire Beck as HR director.

Re:It's Email, why does it matter.. get over it

[enrgeeman]

I know you're Anonymous, but please tell me you wrote White Shits on purpose.

Re:Wagging the dog. (Yahoo - please read)

[bickerdyke]

And while I detest Google's threaded system,

You know that you can turn of the threading in your GMail settings?

That's what I said to staff in Y! London 2007

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a short spell working at Y! in late 2007 and in front of a packed staff audience in a Leicester Square cinema in London (the only place big enough to contain everyone working there) I managed to make a point about this after the new head of the office in London was appointed. I said something along the lines of "I recently joined and noticed there's a large number of staff using Outlook Email and Calendar at work. In Microsoft they say 'we eat our own dogfood' because they use their own software. If we can't be bothered enough to trust in our own software, how can we expect our customers to?" to which I received a standing ovation from the crowd. Sad to see that 6 years later it appears that little has changed.

Outlook....

[Anonymous Coward]

I still load all my gmail, yahoo, and other service accounts... into Outlook.
I just wish Outlook had a shared inbox feature like my iphone. But the genious feature of outlook is to schedule an email. Love it. Boss thinks I'm working at 2am. On a Saturday.

Yahoo Groupware.

[Zombie Ryushu]

Exchange and Outlook is not E-mail, it's Groupware. For Yahoo to compete in this space, they would have to implement GroupDav (CardDav, CalDav WebDav etc.) for all E-mail accounts, and give instructions on how to use ThunderBird for all Yahoo clients.

I nominate Jeff for the purple prose contest!

[Anonymous Coward]

Woot! Gotta love that.

Will Yahoo look beyond email or go bankrupt?

[deviated_prevert]

Yahoo is positioned to do something radical. INDIVIDUALIZED services. Boutique interfaces for individuals and groups to use instead of generalist EMAIL clients. For instance a forum like interface for Classical Musicians, teachers and composers that has a web based music notation service that can spit back pdf at the clients.

There are many other fields that could use webspace mail, chat and customized content creation interfaces. THE PROBLEM is how do you pay the piper. WHEN MICROSHAFT, APPLE AND SONY are trying with the "ROCKSTAR" troll consortium to exercise a ridiculous patent on targeted advertising!

The future of the web is social space services through interfaces, this much is obvious the problem is corporations like SONY, APPLE AND MICROSOFT know this and are trying desperately to all gang up and murder the baby in the bathwater! Unfortunately for the web Yahoo cannot see the forest for the trees and by hooking itself up with BING has made a pact with the devil. NOW IF THIS POST GETS REMOVED SLASHDOT WILL LOOSE FACE IMO

Re:Will Yahoo look beyond email or go bankrupt?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Yahoo is positioned to do something radical. INDIVIDUALIZED services.

You mean like Reddit but + mail? It seems everyone is positioned to do something radical....and that isn't radical.

Re:Wagging the dog. (Yahoo - please read)

[G-forze]

The "Previous message" arrow also sucks. If we disregard the fact that the previous-next-order is backwards IMO, it still simply does not work when newer messages have arrived since opening the latest one. If I open the lastly arrived message in the inbox, and another one arrives while I am reading it, the inbox link displays a new message, but clicking the "Previous" arrow displays the message "You have reached the first message in Inbox.", and I have to go back to Inbox and click the new message from there. What a piece of shit. Same thing with the threaded conversations, btw.

Ca*

[Anonymous Coward]

Using a wildcar* searc* in *utlook seems to *ind parts of words nopro*. Y* must be *w here.

[Serious] Please Enlighten Me.

[Anonymous Coward]

And while Outlook is very near worst of breed for email

I see this derision of Outlook pretty frequently. I understand that, after ~20 years of Outlook, that it may not do exactly what some people might desire or in their preferred way and that those people may have a growing sense of frustration about it. But, the fact is that the major of desktop users still prefer Outlook to anything else out there(for ~20 years!).

So, please do tell, what exactly is the best of breed if , as you say, Outlook is the"very near worst of breed"? It is my opinion, and the userbase seems to suggest that it is the majority opinion, that Outlook remains the best of breed email client, and personal information manager(PIM).

For the record, I'm a Linux user. I want something just like Outlook. The closest thing that I have found and I continue to use is Evolution. It's OK, but it pales in comparison to any version of Outlook since 1997.

Just Want to Say

[carrier lost]

The Yahoo weather app for tablets/phones is aesthetically gorgeous and efficiently laid out.

Ditto for the Flickr app and the Flickr makeover.

Not a fan-boy, but definitely want to give props to a few things I have been enjoying using lately.

Yahoo is so full of it.

[Anonymous Coward]

They are full of themselves, and full of resentment, apparently - Google and Microsoft are crushing them.

Oh, and Yahoo Mail is just horrible.

Dear Marissa,

[freeze128]

If your employees are using email programs that you don't want them to be using, then you're doing *IT* wrong.

Wipe all their desktop PCs. Reinstall OS. DO NOT GIVE THE USERS ADMIN RIGHTS!

No admin rights, they cannot install outlook. Problem solved.

Why do they even have a choice?

"Eat Your Own Dog Food" - A Horrible Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

I roll my eyes when I hear folks say "eat your own dog food", its spouted as if its a good thing, when its just the opposite.

Communist Russia ate its own dog food.

You might say that the U.S. "eating" Japanese cars and Chinese electronics is a bad thing, but I don't... It forces one to compete.

Re:Webmail is for idiots; Outlook is for morons

[Anonymous Coward]

There DO exist mail clients that -- while not perfect by any means -- are clearly, markedly better than either of these.

... and your going to list some and explain why they're better? Er - no you're not. Like 99% of the commenters here, you're simply saying that X and Y are garbage. What would have been more useful would have been to say "Z is better because...".

mine lacks his but bless him he tries

[themushroom]

Cats do lick their harblz if they still have them intact. ;-)

Re:Wagging the dog. (Yahoo - please read)

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Oh, I have, I have. That it is SOP on gmail is what grinds me (and several other details that piss me off about Google in general). I have a HUGE sunk cost in yahoo - years and years of email. Jumping over to gmail isn't an optimal option, although it is getting more attractive by the day...

Re:Wagging the dog. (Yahoo - please read)

[bickerdyke]

Well, that's what I have to say kudos to Google for: dataliberation.org

They have a team dedicated to avoid vendor lock in.

dogpoo stinks

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo certainly are what you get when you are doing a number 2
and actually I think you rather have to be young enough to get the reference :-)

if it is too hard you should get more fiber

Because those Yahoos own Zimbra

[Anonymous Coward]

And Zimbra is a real steamer.

when i worked at yahoo

[Some_Llama]

this was the case with all of yahoo's "products", in my group we used what worked for us in the ways we needed them to work.. much to the chagrin of those who cheer-lead the hardest, this was nowhere better felt than their internal push to get all employees to use yahoo search instead of google.

eating one's own dog food is one thing, but to limit employee productivity when those employees have no direct influence in making the food better? all it did was waste cycles and goodwill by trying to force people who didnt want to use yahoo services to use them anyway, which wasn't (imho) so much about improving them as driving up the stats of per clicks for marketing and ad revenue (more than once i overheard talk along the lines of "if everyone at this location used yahoo search instead it would bump us up by 10k users daily!!!).

-former yahoo IT dood

HTML 5 application cache and IndexedDB

[tepples]

Also, please tell me how I [as a webmail user] peruse my old e-mail when my internet connection goes down

By choosing a webmail provider that offers an offline mode that uses HTML 5 application cache and IndexedDB.

Optionally using company email?

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you want ANY possibility of having your manager reading your private email? Who cares if you're a hosting company, privacy is most important. Sounds like a no-brainer.

Yahoo mail turned to crap

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had Yahoo email for a very long time. I kept opting out of the "new improved" Yahoo email, up until earlier this year it was no longer an option to opt out. And the new improved Yahoo email is absolutely terrible. I have used it on different OSes and browsers and had troubles with all. It just doesn't work a lot of the time. The types of problems seem to vary over time, but I can't understand why I still use it. :\

Yahoo, the play is called "fold" and you missed it

[AbominousSalad]

"...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."

Behold, the rantings of a crazy person.

Also, lol, someone at Yahoo thinks they're relevant. It's not cute anymore.

"anachronism of the now defunct 90s PC era" should be Yahoo's new slogan. Projecting much?