Yahoo! Mail Insanity Continues

by,

Suzanne Coleman

Yesterday I had to log out of my Yahoo! e-mail account and when I logged back in, I was confused.  “What am I looking at?” I asked myself.  That wasn’t my Yahoo! mail!  I squinted, trying to make sense of it all.  I felt like I had suddenly developed cataracts and couldn’t see.

Without warning (as has become the standard with Yahoo!) their e-mail format has changed, once again.  They have now separated our e-mail for us, how “nice,” into the day, month, and who knows what else, that it was delivered.  Right there in our inbox.  So now, instead of a nice clear list of e-mails, there are different fonts and indentations all over the page, causing your eye to literally have to jump around to try and find something you need on the list.  It looks like gibberish.  It is not clear, organized or easy to follow.  And there is no way to fix it and go back to the old format.

With reportedly millions of users, why doesn’t Yahoo! consider their users’ interests and preferences?  I would.  At the very least, they should advise us of upcoming changes, and provide an option to keep things the way we have been using them for decades.  But I guess that would make sense, and their decisions over the last few years usually don’t.

During this time frame, Yahoo! mail has been an on-and-off nightmare of software programming dysfunction.  Every time it seems to be fixed, more problems occur.  These problems have made it so that it cannot be trusted to serve your needs in any reliable capacity.

Yahoo! did finally fix their home page news issues, but the months of problems before they did simply point to terrible management.  There is no other way to look at the repeated, serious failures on their part to provide products that work.

So why is Yahoo! such a poorly-run company?  I’m not sure why they make the decisions that they do, but I have read news reports that have described irrational rigidity of behavior as being an issue with the company’s leadership.

The obvious irony of it all is that if Yahoo!’s management actually used it’s own products, these problems would never have been allowed to continue in the way that they have.  That is of course, presuming that the management is mentally competent and cares about the quality of their business.  Whatever the underlying problems, those responsible for the poor quality of the software products should be replaced with people who are capable of managing their departments and their products successfully.

Maybe one day soon, when the stock is no longer a tech darling, there will be administrative changes that put the right people in the right positions to eliminate this type of bad management.  Until then, we will need to either learn to adapt to these problems, or find another provider for our online needs.