Well, after six years of using Yahoo! Mail, I have switched to Google's Gmail service as of today. Yahoo is slowly losing me as a customer (and a paid Yahoo! Mail Plus customer at $19.99/year) due to what seems to be Google's uncanny ability to understand the simplistic, fine grain of how users (customers) perform workflows with their services. 360 blogs (
360.yahoo.com)? Way to cumbersome - I would rather use a text-based blog address than something like "
http://360.yahoo.com/blogname". WAY to ugly for me to give anyone. I like
Blogger.com, which is why I keep my blog here. I have recently become a big fan of Google's personalized homepage (
www.google.com/ig) to replace my "My Yahoo!" startup page in Firefox 1.5, and it is SO nice not to have annoying advertisements in my face any longer. The Yahoo! Finance and other pages (like Yahoo! News) just have way to many and HUGE ads that grate on my nerves. I tried using "Remove It Permanently" and "AdBlock" Firefox extensions, but was only partially pleased with both. I would prefer a network that uses non-distracting ads (like Google). I do not mind Google's ads in Gmail at all, and it seems ads are hard to find anywhere else on the Google network (except for standard search "paid ads", which again are not distracting and are fine with me). Yahoo! Photos has been replaced by my Flickr account (of course, Yahoo! owns Flickr, dammit), and I just have no reason to use many (if not all) of Yahoo!'s services any longer. I still have subscriptions to several Yahoo! Groups and keep a mock portfolio of equities I track at Yahoo! Finance, but for day-to-day news gathering, email, RSS and other needs, Yahoo! has just lost me. Have you ever checked out Google News? Holy cow what a cool service, and NOT cluttered with ads.
www.forbes.com is so incredibly annoying now (I have never seen so many distracting ads) that I just check Forbes' RSS feeds and go to their site when I want to read the full article.
Anyway, I even *tried* to use the new Yahoo! Mail Beta (a clone of Outlook 2003 really) and even though it was beta, it was UNGODLY slow and cumbersome. Drag-n-drop foldered messages were so buggy (not a desktop experience at all), and the entire beta interface was so slow as to be unusable. Granted, it was a large step up from the old Yahoo! Mail, but after using Gmail for my primary personal email and then several other secondary accounts (for newsletters, etc.), I got used to the "conversations" threading feature (which is awesome) and the sheer speed at which Gmail works over the web. It is incredibly fast, which is the #1 thing that made me switch. I don't know how Google does it (hiring Ph.D.'s in user interface and AI is a good start, hehe), but they seem to always get it right. KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) is a methodology they appear to follow very well and I love it. It just works, it's streamlined, and the core competency of what they accomplish seems to be the top priority - they are not trying to be "everything to everyone" as so many other companies have tried (and failed ultimately), including Yahoo! I think. I even like that the Gmail interface on my RAZR (
http://m.gmail.com) works VERY well and having mobile Gmail on my cellphone is fantastic, even though I did like Yahoo!'s mobile interface (very streamlined).
A Yahoo! Chief Marketing Officer recently made comments at the January 2006 CES tradeshow that they are "emotionally
connected to their users (source:
Charlene Li's blog) by saying "people don't have an emotional connection with Google, but they have one with Yahoo!". That used to be true. I want a slick, streamlined, non-cluttered and FAST interface to the things I use
*every day* on the net. Yahoo! no longer provides that (for me), but Google does. Emotional connection or not, Google suits me now MUCH more than Yahoo! does, even though I admire Semel for what he has done with Yahoo! over the years.
I love this quote from January 24, 2006 as well, even though the blogosphere is blowing it ALL out of proportion. Yahoo! concedes defeat in search to Google. This probably won't be the last. I am seriously not trying to bash Yahoo!, but it seems Google is just more suited towards the workflow I want, as opposed to the social end like Yahoo! appears to be pushing (yes, their search engine is probably just fine, but who drinks both Coke and Pepsi? You pick a brand and stick with it). Now, I am off to test Google Talk and possibly see if I can cease using Yahoo! Messenger (which is feature-filled, but has turned into bloatware with verion 7 I think - need a "light" client). So, Outlook 2003 has gone away (we need a Google Calendar!) and Yahoo! has as well for the most part - my email is now solely web-based using Gmail. I can now understand why Microsoft is woried about Google. I still use MS Word and MS Excel of course, but who knows - there could be compatible word processing and spreadsheet programs (for free, hehe) offered from Google one day that bits heavily into Micro$oft's valued Office franchise. Competition is a good thing, no?
