April 17th, 2008

So, I suppose I should clarify my post yesterday about Yahoo and why I even care. ‘Net properties are, for the most part, owned and run by one of three corporations: Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo. As a consumer, my opinions of those three are as follows, and these are strictly my views as an average person:

Microsoft is a big, mean, evil, money grubbing corporation. Their products are less about providing a solid consumer experience and more about tightening their stranglehold on the tech sector. Their web pages are bland and uninteresting and are about as useful, to me the consumer, as the dictionary on my bookshelf. Sure, I may look at it once in a while, but less and less frequently. Why should I when I have much more useful and entertaining tools like Wikipedia at my disposal? I never use any of their sites because they really don’t feel like they were ever intended to be used by people.

Google is the epitomy of the faceless corporation. They don’t issue statements. They don’t have a “friendly” main page. There aren’t any “web celebrity” bloggers I can think of who work for Google. They’re just there. And every once in a while they come out from behind their white-washed fortress to buy up some property for a ghastly amount of money, like a trap door spider. I don’t trust Google because, publicity-wise, they’re a complete non-entity. I’ve lived under the rule of Corporate America long enough to develop a healthy distrust of secretive companies.

Yahoo is, well, boring. Look at Y!Music, Y!Widgets, and Y!Green. What’s missing? Personality. Everything about every Yahoo site is perfectly functional and completely plain. You remember that brown-haired girl your mom once forced you to introduce yourself to at church? The one with no obvious physical deformities or asshole friends or bad habits but who rarely smiled and answered all of your questions with one or two words? That’s Yahoo.

And that’s why I care. I don’t like the possibility of having to choose between The Publicly Evil Microsoft and the Private Possibly a Serial Killer Living Next Door Google. And that’s my opinion, as a consumer, of those two.

Yahoo has a chance to grow up into a real knockout, as soon as she stops wearing figure-hiding clothes and learns to smile. Or, Yahoo could grow up to be a man-hating militant lesbian, in which case I’d have three bad options to choose from. And let’s be honest, Yahoo’s got a lot of things going for her, like YUI and the OpenID idea. Yahoo’s also got a lot of public sentiment in their favor: they have some high-profile folks who are more than willing to talk about what the company is up to without coming across as conceited dicks, most public stories about Yahoo as a company mention how well they treat their employees and/or talk about their latest mass party event, and they’re one of a handful of big companies that not only understand that geeks need to take things apart and put them back together in different configurations, they support it.

But the sites branded with the Y!Style are really lacking in that undefinable “interest” factor. I wish I could narrow it down more than that. Visiting a Yahoo site is overwhelming because you’re constantly being reminded of the thousands of other Yahoo sites. It’s feature overload, I guess. If the tools I want to use were more specialized and separate from the Yahoo family, I would use them more often -

- especially if Yahoo could learn to foster a bit more “community-ness” to their sites. Yahoo’s “communities” have always suffered one of two major setbacks: either they’ve never been developed into fully useful communities (like Y!Groups - great idea but lacking in many areas) or they’ve failed to attract anyone except retards and lunatics (Y!Answers).

So, the summarize, I’m not wishing ill on Yahoo at all, and my previous post wasn’t intended to imply that. Yahoo’s got a lot to offer, but I’d probably take them up on a lot more of their offers if the sites I want to visit had just a little less Y!Saturation.