I’m finally getting around to cleaning up some old personal photo essays and so forth, moving them from photo.net to philip.greenspun.com. An example is my personal guide to New York City. Almost every page in this little museum piece of how the Web worked back in 1995 and 1996 contained a link to the Yahoo directory, e.g., http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/design_arts/fashion/. Despite having thousands of employees, Yahoo was apparently unable to maintain a set of redirects and all of these links are now dead. That’s a great way to lose readers and lose Google Rank.
It is tough to understand why Microsoft would pay billions of dollars for a company that can’t manage this fundamental part of Web publishing. I admit to being rather lame and sloppy, but links that I published back in the early 1990s are still functioning, albeit sometimes through one or two redirects (transparent to the user).
Especially when most of those links are from DMOZ which Yahoo helped create, at least back when there was talent there.
Perhaps Microsoft is hoping a merge with Yahoo will cancel out what they each do not get about the web.
Plug in a new piece of hardware, and Windows offers to search for matching drivers on the Internet. Would be pretty cool if it worked, but the search for drivers pretty much always fails, in my experience.
You would think that Microsoft – one of the biggest and richest software companies on the planet – could find drivers for Windows. Especially when I can find the same drivers quite readily.
… and Microsoft wants to be your search engine.
Let’s not kid ourselves. Like all these internet juggernauts yahoo is too big to have a coherent adherence to any standards or common sense. BECAUSE they have thousands of employees there’s a lot of politics and statistically there are bound to be quite a few people that just don’t have a clue making decisions. One example of bad decisions due to politics/policy is what they did to most companies they bought (geocities, flickr, egroups) with mostly everything changed in such a way that the “old ways” do not work anymore and everything requires a yahoo account (especially annoying for egroups).
But the pinnacle of incompetence has to be the “medireview” where they would change a list of strings (like “eval” gets changed to “review”) in OUTGOING (!!) emails (yes, that is including for paying customers not only the users of the free webmail). Keep in mind that those “bad strings” would be replaced even inside words (most popular example: medieval gets silently replaced with medireview).
And for months they claimed they were doing it for “security of the users”!
Failure to keep urls working when you decide to rearrange your website is very lame. A web company that fails to do so should be very embarrassed. Growing does not have to mean becoming incompetent. Toyota has far more employees than Yahoo. They know how to implement best practices globally. It is much easier for a web company to follow practices such as keeping urls working than it is to pass ideas around physical factories all over the globe. Blaming politics is not an excuse for inept management. We should expect more not less from companies.