What do Starboard Value
make or sell that is any use to me?
Flickr is useful.
Yahoo! seems resigned to its fate, and says it is "pleased" with taking a $98m loss on the quarter. The Purple Palace on Tuesday recorded yet another drop in revenues and acknowledged it was making "significant progress" towards the sale of its core business. For the Q1 2016 period, ended March 31: Revenue was $1.09bn, down …
It's easy to see why Yahoo is in the tailspin that it is. Their complete lack of customer service is not great, but the proud manner in which they boast that if you find contact details for them, then it's a scam number is absolutely reprehensible!
I've been using a Yahoo email address for about 15 years, initially to isolate me from my ISP. However, for a long time I've had a nagging feeling that I should set up email on my own domain. Setting up and running a mail server is not a five minute task, and paying a monthly fee doesn't seem so appealing when you can just accept Yahoo ads and carry on for "free".
However, last week, I got a message to the effect that since I was accessing the Internet in a new location, I needed to get a verification code sent to a secondary email address. The default "help" section on the Yahoo website helpfully says that part of their Terms and Conditions is to maintain an active secondary email address - who knew, or can possible remember all the small print they've ever read?? As I've left the company where that secondary email address was registered, I've no way of getting back into my Yahoo account.
I guess I'm about to undergo a complete digital reset on my life, since everything goes back to that email address!
The lessons are:
- just because a company is providing a service today, it doesn't mean that they care about keeping you on that service
- although I've no sympathy for Yahoo itself, I've found that I feel slightly sad for its employees, who have to go down in its tailspin because of a culture that's proud of having no customer service...