Yahoo's Happy To Share Personnel News; Not So Chatty About New Webmail Ads
So, we were just reading the newswires, and came across this story of how one of Yahoo's co-founders, Jerry Yang, has been named CEO. Well, "yahoo" for him . . . we guess. Perhaps he'll help trickle down some better business practices. Or solve one weird and annoying one in particular.
Normally this announcement wouldn't be much of a blip on our radar . . . but we subscribe to the aforementioned newswire through our Yahoo mail. Which, as of about a week ago has been crazy with advertisements. Not spam -- we mean that all over our webmail screen there are now flash ads and other types of adverts embedded (see above for an example; ads vary depending on what you're doing with the web mail). So this personnel announcement got our dander up, because Yahoo is on our s-list right now.
The ads are wholly annoying. Should that be happening? Because, c'mon -- we PAY for the email . . .AT&T/Yahoo is our DSL/email provider; since we're contributing that $20 or whatver per month, we don't know why we should be subject to looking at invasive flashing ads and micro ads all over our formerly pristine email page.
We looked for contact info to ask about it; a phone number was a mere four clicks away. Ugh. Called the line. Autovoicedetector failed to get our account number right. We keyed it in. Then we were offered three choices, none of which fit our question (not cancelling, not upgrading, not wondering about our bill . . .) Then we were put on hold. Five minutes turned to 10, then 15 . . .
At that point a very nice CSR answered. After going through all the obligatory questioning to ensure we are indeed a customer (because you can't answer a general question without knowing our mother's maiden name, right?), he could not help us. He didn't even quite know what we meant . . . but he was very nice. Evidently he thought tech support in India could help us -- we had our doubts. But guess what? About a five-minute hold later, the tech support rep in India (who was also very nice) informed us that we could expect to see these ads "for about another month," as can all AT&T web-type customers world-wide.
This business plan makes no sense to us -- did he get it wrong? Ads for just a month? How does that compute? It's like a tax with a sunset provision that never quite sets -- once you have another income stream, are you really gonna let it stop? We doubt it. And, importantly, how will our experience as a customer be better for it? Hmmm?
In any case, we just thought the contrast between theoretical Yahoo, about which we read lofty announcements in the newswires, and real Yahoo, which is noncommunicative and currently annoying us via webmail ads, was strange.
Perhaps the new CEO will encourage a reduction in hair-brained schemes? Or perhaps it'll go the other way . . . who else provides DSL these days?