Yahoo plans to release some technologies, including storage technologies, to the open source community, a senior executive of the company said. These are systems that Yahoo built to help it handle large numbers of users on its websites, but that don’t necessarily give it a competitive advantage, said David Chaiken, chief architect at Yahoo, in an interview in Bangalore on Friday.
I like a lot of the stuff Yahoo has open sources. YUI is one I use specifically a lot connecting all my embedded OS’s to a usable web interface to control them.
What competitive advantage does Yahoo have these days? Seriously – it must be something.
This is great to hear of course.
Toolbars. Toolbars everywhere.
Search engines with advertising can make anywhere up to 5c per query, and since most computer illiterate persons get tricked into installing a Yahoo search bar, a lot of money ends up going their way.
This… On windows their toolbar is near impossible t remove completely, try it with Firefox, it won’t uninstall like anything else, it leaves a bunch of things changed in about:config
Winamp toolbar does the same.
Toolbars/bundleware is the new malware. If you can’t/won’t make it 100% free, and people don’t want to pay for your shit either, just give it up already.
What do they have to gain by making their product difficult to remove? I have had a similar experience with several other Yahoo products. It only serves as a short term gain with the impact of alienating the customer base long term.
It is small things like this that tell me the company has a culture problem and doesn’t understand the market.
Culture problems aren’t solved over night so it is going to be a long ride to the bottom before they figure out what’s wrong.
I’d argue (without having any insider knowledge, just vanilla punditry) that we’re not Yahoo’s customer base; those who don’t know how to really use (or troubleshoot) computers, are.
That is a great business model if you are AOL and it is 1995.