Yahoo – a tale of two companies?

I suppose there must be a size n where for companies that reach a size greater than n, there is always some part of the company with its head crammed firmly up its ass, in spite of the ground breaking work happening elsewhere. Apparently Yahoo is at least as big as that magical size.
Tonight, I wanted to check out the new weezer video on yahoo music. Only for a mac user, that generates a pop up indicating that Netscape 4.7 is required (screenshot here) That’s a positively pre-historic browser version – it’s eight years old for crying out loud. That would be like steaming down the “information superhighway” with a Victrola on the dashboard of my buggy, whip in hand.

This goes to spite the post I was formulating in my head praising Yahoo Farechase and the new Yahoo Maps Beta (which is arguably better than google maps, for now due to cool hover effects, multiple directions, and route numbers for rural roads in directions).

Then again, since I know Yahoo bought farechase, along with their new beta email (which i doubt beats gmail, because the tired old desktop email metaphor that everyone copies is not better) it may just be that “old” yahoo is stuck in some kind of 1999 time warp, and they have to buy innovation (like Flickr, for example) rather than cook it at home.

Or maybe the Yahoo music team is too busy “innovating” ways to break tools people create to get their content to get around to making it available in contemporary browsers.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.