Why I Hate Yahoo- Jerry-- Are You Listening?

Why Are These 2 People Smiling?

Tonight the BRANDEMiX website went MIA.
That's right. Gone, kaput.

It was there at lunchtime and erased by dinner.

I called my hosting company, Yahoo right away and was told that my hold time for Customer Service would be less than 30 minutes. It was more like 50 minutes. Yippee. 50 minutes of listening to all the products and services I can enjoy to optimize my website that I can't take advantage of because my website is gone.

When I finally got someone on the phone, she confirmed that indeed, my website is gone. Duh! She went on to promise that the engineers will get right on it and she'll call me back in 30 minutes once my site is back up. She couldn't tell me why it happened and now, 1 hour later, it's still gone and no one has called me back.

So all my keyword clicks, my new business efforts and my branding have gone to waste. It's as if BRANDEMiX.com was never there. I've been erased.

My hatred wasn't always so. I used to love Yahoo. When I started BRANDEMiX, Yahoo was there for me, teaching me all about setting up business emails, ftps, subdomains and perl. Yahoo was my silent partner. I even went so far as to write love letters to them, telling them how I would love to work with them on their Internal and Employer branding. They had done so much for me, I wanted to return the favor.

But in the past year, beginning with business email accounts that have continued to go down without cause, no response to the countless customer satisfaction surveys that I have taken time to submit and over-promising and under-delivering again and again, my new year's resolution is to drop them by the end of the year.

This is from their website:

What We Do

Yahoo! powers and delights our communities of users, advertisers, and publishers - all of us united in creating indispensable experiences, and fueled by trust.

I am not powered or delighted. And, since an hour has gone by and there has been no phone call from them, even to say they're still working on the problem, I do not trust them.

Yes, I know that Jerry and Susan, the CEO and President respectively are busy at the CES in Vegas (See article below) trying to drum up more business, but what about my business?

Chief Yahoo Jerry Yang Holds Forth On Mobile

Yahoo is trying to do for mobile devices what it did for the Internet-connected computer a decade ago.

Today during a keynote speech here at CES, Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang made a slew of announcements geared toward attracting eyeballs on cellphones. The biggest news is that the company is opening up its mobile platform to outside programmers so they can develop mini-applications called widgets that can be compatible on a wider range of devices. Yang said these applications will attract more users and help increase advertising revenues. "It's time to get Yahoo yodeling again," Yang said.

And, just because misery loves company, I went to the yahoo finance message board to see what was on there and I found this:
I don't understand why they continue trying 8-Jan-08 08:11 pm

YHOO is last place in the one-legged race. There is no hope for anything positive at this juncture. A slow, steady death spiral is a certainty. It's painful to watch but interesting at the same time. YHOO is a 10K lesson in failure for me, but I know it must be a lot worse for the employees who will be losing their jobs. Good luck to all, these are going to be some of the toughest times America will ever face.

That cheered me up somehow to know I'm not alone. Then I went to check on the Google vs Yahoo stock comparison. Red is Google and Blue is Yahoo. Ha ha.













Sadly, my frustrations with YAHOO parallel the road to employee disengagement- the bigger they are- the harder they fall. I was passionate and had a connection to the brand. My passionate wish is to now see the empire crumble (once I migrate to someplace new.) According to Gallup- this makes me a cave dweller- Actively disengaged and Consistently Against Virtually Everything Yahoo.