Everybody has a secret tech shame, and mine is that I’ve got a Yahoo! Mail address that’s been my primary email since high school. Recently, they did what Yahoo! always does, and turned Yahoo! Mail into GMail, but purple. I hate it. And I’m not alone.
I should note that I hate it not because it’s just a pale knock-off of Gmail, because, come on, I’ve been with the company for far longer than I care to admit. I’m used to that. No, the problem is that basically they updated their app and now I can barely access my email. If you want people to keep using your email system, you really do not want to force them to use workarounds.
But that doesn’t mean everybody has rational responses. And, yeah, they hate it because it’s Gmail:
Yahoo has turned itself into a poor imitation of Gmail. The whole reason that I stuck with Yahoo mail is because it ISN’T Gmail which I hate! Now Yahoo has lost its whole raison d’etre as an alternative more user friendly email. If Yahoo doesn’t allow its customers to revert back to the classic version then I might as well migrate to Gmail as it’s now virtually the same thing!
Really, this obscures the bigger issue, though, which is that the damn site doesn’t work. Personal experience indicates there’s some weirdness with Flash, of all things, that crashes the site. To be fair, I’m using Ubuntu, because I’m a cheap Yankee, so that isn’t helping matters. Even so, the problem extends to mobile apps, so the upgrade is obviously causing more problems.
Yahoo! will eventually iron out these kinks, but by the same token, one has to wonder why they bothered. They’re not Google and they’re never going to be it, and frankly, there’s value in having a service that works.