Any of the three people that read one of my personal blogs knows that I am not having a good time with Yahoo right now. A couple of years ago I signed up with them as my ISP for Make It Big In Games because I am not a web guy and they had a decent plan with one click install of Wordpress. I have regretted it ever since. The service is incredibly SLOOOOW, they wrap in a bunch of Yahoo crap selling their services on a site that I am paying for, they spam my email accounts, and a bunch of other grievances that I don’t want to bore you with.
Since Jerry Yang took over a year ago, Yahoo seems rudderless. What do they stand for? Like I said, I use them as an ISP, but not for long. I have not bought anything from a Yahoo store for years. I only use their email as my SPAM account. Their Finance service is good, but I people don’t buy stocks much due to greedy CEO’s and an uncertain economy. Yahoo Messenger got SO BLOATED and wanted to control so much of my computer that I quit using it years ago and finally, as the family’s default IT guy, insisted that everybody in my family use Meebo instead. I have not performed an Internet search on Yahoo since 1999. Have any of you? It goes on and on. They have lost it.
Three years ago Yahoo almost got cool. They bought delicious, Flickr, and Yahoo Games was selling a lot of games. Now I am concerned for these three services. I have used Delicious as an online bookmarking service since it first started, and would hate to change, but without a significant update since 2005, I am beginning to look elsewhere. I LOVE Flickr, and have turned on everybody I know to the service. Between us all we have thousands of photos uploaded to the site, and my daughter even has a pro account. I am looking for a replacement service.
That leaves Yahoo Games. The only thing they really bring to the party here is audience. They sell the same games as anybody else. Early in the history of GarageGames, Yahoo Games was a major force to be reckoned with in the down loadable games space. Now they are just one of the herd, a simple distribution outlet, and there are more innovative services out there.
To see the magnitude of the problem Yahoo is facing, look at this Tech Crunch list of high level executives that have left Yahoo in the past couple of months. . The only interesting services they had just had their founders jump ship to “other opportunities”. Yang continues to write fluffy, no-substance emails talking about all of the opportunity Yahoo has at its fingertips, but that certainly isn’t working. It is frightening. I honestly can’t see a way out except to get a tough new visionary CEO that can come up with a valid vision and enforce it. They should have taken the Microsoft money and leadership when they had the chance.
-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
