I see the Yahoo! brand has extended to the Sheraton these days, with the Yahoo Link@Sheraton wifi lounges. Yahoo! has been overshadowed somewhat by Google, which this Brandweek article indicates—so it needs to regain its initiative.
   In my world, Yahoo! has excellent groups, but I’m still sore about the fact it deleted one of mine unilaterally—just as Google and Blogger deleted a whole bunch of Chris’s blogs in December (as well as one belonging to the English Guy in Florida).
   What does it mean when a brand commits these misdeeds? While Chris got his groups back online—kind of—all Yahoo! ever did was send me replies with copy pasted from its publicly accessible web pages. And that was only one out of three times, based on my recollection—the other two times no one responded.
   So, in 2003, I questioned Yahoo!’s ability to think and act in its pioneering ways, as did Atul Chitnis in his diary, or, should I now say, blog. (Back then, I labelled it an ‘online diary’—unlike most blogs there are no feedback links.)
   When I heard of Yahoo! going in to these Sheraton lounges, I first thought back to my negative experiences of a company that treated me unfairly by deleting a group, then treated me like a moron by having copy-and-pasters pretending to be technicians. Atul probably feels the same way as his diary entry is still there. Only after these negative thoughts, did I read my more considered article from 2003, where I did suggest Yahoo! recapture its old ways of doing something more daring. To me, going into the offline world is such a move. It combines high-tech with a sense of service—two things that Jerry Yang and David Filo offered when they ran Yahoo! from their garage in Silicon Valley, skipping their classes at Stanford.
   I can only hope the support for these wifi services in these lounges won’t be as bad as what I confronted those many years ago. Then, I wrote, ‘If Yahoo! is top of the tree, where is the money going? I can’t see it going to people because I haven’t heard from anyone inside there for a long time. And people, ladies and gentlemen, is what made Yahoo! top property.’ My comment still stands. posted by Jack Yan, 9:51 AM  permalink