Of all the half assed companies out there, I cannot for the life of me figure out WTF is going on with Yahoo.
There are some companies that suck, but they do so in a way you almost understand. Delta — “America's Meanest Airline” — is a perfect example. The airline relentlessly cut costs to the point that if you need customer service, suicide is a preferable option. Delta has the lowest passenger satisfaction, highest flight delays, and highest baggage fees in the industry. (We have been long various airlines this past year).
I understand their suckiness, I get that its actually a cost savings program the company puts into place between bankruptcies.
Yahoo, on the other hand, seems hell bent on destroying their own value as fast as they can, across all of their properties:
Yahoo Message Boards area perfect example. They were once a huge traffic driver, but became so overrun with Spam and penny stock touts as to be all but worthless. And Yahoo owned search as one point in time, before Google steamrolled them.
The latest debacle is Yahoo messenger. I cannot log on without being greeted with a dozen spims (Spam IMs). Its made the product utterly unusable.If i could figure out how to resign from the program, I would — its tied into mail, which is why Yahoo is now my junk mail address.
At one time, I used a ton of Yahoo offerings. Now, I use Yahoo Tech Ticker, a home page, and their email as my junk address. That’s pretty much it — from indispensable to annoying in a few short years . . .
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A dark horse for self-destruction is the usually astute Amazon. They are running a similar risk by allowing their eejit kindle fanboys to pollute the once valuable Amazon rankings.
Consider this extreme example: Of the 519 review of the The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, 87 are 1 star reviews. Nearly all of them are kiddies whining about the lack of a kindle version. Amazon apologized to Lewis, but left all the irrelevant 1 star reviews posted. (As benevolent dictator, I would impose capital punishment, but that’s just me).
Thus, I no longer waste my time reviewing products or sellers, as the Amazon review system has become corrupted. Its no longer worth my time. I have found myself paying less attention to Amazon reviews, as I now know they are written by eejit children, so their value is far less than I previously believed. Even worse, I know Amazon makes the kindle, so we have bad faith thrown into the mix.
We shall see if it impacts my shopping habits . . .
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Question: What is the next valuable property to allow itself to be devalued will be? Who will somehow take an asset and turn it into a negative?
“What (will be) the next valuable property to allow itself to be devalued? Uh, Congress?
” … I use Yahoo Tech Ticker …”
Hmmm….. The Big Picture previously identified an undervalued asset (was it deal maker?) and made a public offer. Based on Yahoo’s efforts to monetize whatever they can (hence all the ads), perhaps The Big Picture can make Yahoo! an offer to take the Tech Ticker off their hands? While they may reject the offer now, you never know when they’ll have a sale…
Three companies that seem to be managed for the good of the officers and to the detriment of shareholders: MSFT, CSCO and Intel.
Dell computer is an enigma in that it should have died years ago…..Michael Dell is not so much smart as he was incredibly lucky; talk about timing! This guy comes along just when the PC adoption S curve was going into its parabolic phase and he’s right there producing his IBM clones as they were known ….Alas, now the PC is at the top of the S, or the commodity phase, and Dell can no longer compete as they never were an innovator.
Why do companies degrade and implode? Easy, they do not value the goodwill of their customers; they are run by bottom line bean counters. Thus, we have Eric Schmidt constantly denegrating his customers. (The customers don’t like our spy in the sky? Let them move.) We have the telephone, cable, airline, etc companies all having terrible telephone service and its near impossible to get recompense for their mistakes. Very frustrating. I hate them all and won’t even read their ‘deals’ because they obfuscate the restrictions and downsides.
For example the airline companies charge you for changing your reservations. They get $3B per year for this penalty. (What smart company wants to penalize their own customers?) Then we have Southwest Air that allows you to cancel your reservation without penalty and gives you a full year to use the proceeds. SWA makes money, the rest don’t. Duh.
Um, Microsoft has been doing a pretty good job of killing its brand for the past decade or two, and it’s getting better (ahem, worse) at it all the time…. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Kin, the Zune, Vista, etc., etc….. The blunders seem to get worse with time.
Dell makes some pretty good servers, their support is great if you pay for it.
Some companies are just a really big bright suns(Nike) and they either blow up or slowly fade away and get eaten by a giant black hole. Some become moons, they are pretty bland and will always be there. MSFT is a giant moon. Sometimes a person will land on a moon and make it a sun again.
Chartist, throw in pretty much all the healthcare companies in that mix. Not only are they screwing their shareholders. They’re also screwing all their customers. Too bad these companies are too well connected to go kaput.
I guess Yahoo board thought Carol Bartz would be the Alan Mulally of dotcom. Boy, is she robbing them blind. They’re probably really sorry that they didn’t jump at the chance to hire Mark Hurd. (If that thought even occured to them)
Ebay.
Getting 25% – 40% discount products on there was a breeze back in the early 00s. Now you have to navigate a minefield in order to feel the same way you feel coming out of a chain store (like you paid too much). If you are looking for something, Ebay might not even have it. It didn’t used to be that way. They have driven many sellers away and thus have lowered their marketable quality.
Some kudos to their competitors. Many of them sell very close to what the hawkers sold for on Ebay. I don’t know if store prices came down or Ebay prices went up
I don’t know what’s with Yahoo. They should have done better. I have used their “Portfolio Manager” for years and watch the market on “Financials”…just to check in. I use Yahoo Mail as my “indie address” and am happy with it…but in the last year they seem to be very “has been” in their content.
I’m not sure what they can do…but whatever they are doing isn’t cutting it for going forward. Although, I’m happy with “My Yahoo” for the stuff I’ve always used it for.
On Delta… A Frequent Flyer in my household has had terrible problems with Delta. On the eve of a big Med Products Meeting in Atlanta (where multiple meetings with Key Partners (Clients) in Venture were lined up… Our group was called around 10.00 p.m. the night before a 7 a.m. flight and told the Flight was CANCELLED! That left a scramble for our Business Group to try to get to Atlanta in time for the first meeting at 10:00 a.m.! After much ado…and phone calls..Partners found a USAIR flight to Atlanta that cost $500.00 from Raleigh to Atlanta (approx. a 6 hr. drive). The price was twice as much…but what could you do at (by that time) around Mid Night after all the phone calls back and forth with partners to get the whole thing worked out.
Conclusion of Partners was that Delta cancelled the flight at last minute because they didn’t book enough and one partner decided to get in the car and drive the 6 hours because he didn’t want to pay the extra money…the rest used USAir and it worked out.
It was a mess though. Tired Partners with stress having to deal with a 10:00 p.m call from Delta when a big presentation with Clients and scheduled appointments had been worked on for weeks?
Not Good.
AAPL sure did look like a great brand slinking into a slow and ignoble decay. I still haven’t returned to AAPL products. Of course, there seems to have a turn around…
Starbucks is a potential disaster. The brand strategy is a ponzi scheme of elitism: when there’s no one socially below you that isn’t going, the bottom will have to fall out – why go if everyone else can? Dried, reconstituted coffee? Really?
Yahoo is really the one that takes the cake, though. Decent product and brand. They still have good finance content deals. But there’s very little exhilarating going on there and a media service needs at least 10% exhilarating. Google is still exhilarating.
Also stumbled upon this site today:
Digg downsizing — long overdue
http://www.w3matter.com/journal/2010/10/25/digg-downsizing-long-overdue.html
You might want to check out this guy’s writing Barry. You’d probably appreciate his style
Wouldn’t the Wall Street Journal be at the top of the list? Or maybe you consider them devalued already. I still have my subscription, but it seems to get less and less attention.
I have to disagree about Amazon, though. Using the book you gave as an example: One glance at the ratings graph and I see overwhelmingly positive reviews, with a big bump at the bottom in the one stars. I suspect I know what’s going on right away – and another half minute to click on the one star link and scan the reviews confirms my suspicions. The one stars are mostly idiots and ‘no kindle no stars’ fanboys. I can then click on the most helpful reviews link and learn about the product. Rather than censoring reviews by some mysterious process, Amazon has given me the tools to quickly filter the reviews for myself, which, to me, makes Amazon reviews more valuable.
As soon as Yahoo started to insult my intelligence and talk to me like Oprah/The View TV, I switched to Google. That was 3 or 4 years ago. I have no idea what they’re doing now and could not care less.
CNN is again at the brink of disintegration and becoming The Tattler of cable news. Another one who thinks I have the attention span and IQ of a gnat.
RIMM. They looked into their future and they saw PALM.
You mean besides Microsoft? Right?
Ah…Tarkus beat me to it…RIMM…by refusing to put actual internet into their machines and even their email sucks…you can’t do much but type text with a RIMM
the other….maybe Bank of America
Yahoo’s messenger SPAM IM issue is solved (for me at least) with Trillian. I stopped using all the spam-laden captive IM products after I started seeing valuable inches of screenspace consumed by crap. Ergo they’re all still stuck on the old BS sticky-eyeball concept of EBITDA.
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