I have felt that Yahoo is a doomed company for a long time. I’ve had problems with obfuscating and bureaucratic approaches to problems with my yahoo email account before … in fact, I’ve been annoyed with Yahoo since at least 2003.
So I don’t use my Yahoo email account very much. This evening, I tried to log on and got the following page.
Take a look – can you tell me what is wrong with this picture? The fact is that it’s giving me two choices, neither of which is true. Nothing is worse than a computer program that gives you only a limited number of choices that fail to cover all the possibilities, thus allowing a user like me to “fall through the cracks.”
The first option: I’m a resident of the U.S. Not true. The second option: I’m a resident of Australia. Also not true. And why does yahoo keep thinking I’m Australian, anyway? That’s not the first time I’ve had that experience. Admittedly, I’ve been in Australia while happening to use Yahoo. But I’ve never lived there. And currently, I live in South Korea. That wasn’t a choice on the web page. Why not? At first, I thought… are they inspecting my IP address? I guess their software isn’t that smart. Because, what’s even funnier? When I gave up and lied, and told them I was a U.S resident, and was able to check my email, well, subsequently, when I logged out of my email, they threw me onto Yahoo.co.kr! That means… they CAN, in fact, tell by my IP address that I’m Korea. So what idiot came up with the software that only offered the two choices shown on that web page?
The header on that page said, “help us make your Yahoo mail more relevant.” Earth to Carol Bartz: maybe you should ask yourself, “how can YOU make my Yahoo mail more relevant?” Right now, it can’t even figure out what country I’m in, and it’s too poorly designed to even give me the option to let me tell it what country I’m in. A LESS relevant internet mail program would be difficult to invent.
If you haven’t already… sell your stock in this company.
