Troubled! Yahoo! tries! to! keep! staff! sweet! with! free! nosh! Yahoo!'s shiny new CEO Marissa Mayer has nabbed a former Amazon exec for the job of chief marketing officer at the ailing web firm. Kathy Savitt, founder of social commerce startup Lockerz and also a former exec at American Eagle Outfitters, will start the job next month, Mayer said in a canned statement. Mayer is attempting …
I'm not the first to say it, and I won't be the last.
There are potentially useful parts of Yahoo vying for attention with shite like horoscopes and something called 'omg!'. The news is also shown on the screen, which is currently providing me with tips for better boobs. No doubt these bring in revenue, but for normal people like me it helps to keep me away from Yahoo for anything but my rarely used e-mail account I use for spammy sign ups.
Yours is the only comment that mentions email, which was also ignored in the article. I wonder how many other users are like you and I, using Yahoo primarily for email, mostly residual email in my case. I think they should try to fix their kernel service before anything else--but I've yet to see any evidence they understand what's going on.
Suggestion: Yahoo should add POWERFUL anti-spam tools that would make Yahoo so threatening to spammers that they would stay away. This would greatly increase the value of Yahoo email, Yahoo, and even the Internet as a whole. Something like SpamCop, but with multiple rounds of analysis and targeting to pursue ALL of the spammers' accomplices, disrupt ALL of the spammers' infrastructure, and help and protect ALL of the spammers' victims.
I personally hope that Yahoo! does find a way to survive with most of its current web services intact, as I like having a third viable choice for web services such as e-mail, maps with directions, aggregated movie theater show times, special-interest discussion groups (e.g. Yahoo! Groups), etc. than just Google and Microsoft's competing offerings. While Yahoo! may not be the great force in the Web that it once was, there are still a few niche things that I feel that it does better, so I really want to see it stick around.
When the company I worked for was going through the ringer some 10+ years ago as part of the cost cutting they did away with the free lunches. I don't think Yahoo has quite got this the right way round... Or more to the point, if the company is not doing too well and they've been laying staff off etc, is the promise of free food really going to be the deal-breaker between staff staying or opting to go elsewhere?
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