Only 25% of Yahoo Staff "Eat Their Own Dog Food" 292
nk497 writes "Only 25% of Yahoo staff have obeyed the company's request to 'eat their own dog food' and switch to Yahoo Mail, a colorful internal memo has revealed. The leaked email, acquired by All Things Digital, implores staff to move over to the corporate version of Yahoo's webmail system, gently lambasting staff who refuse to part with Microsoft Outlook. The message goes on to take a swipe at what appears to be Yahoo employees' preferred mail client, Microsoft Outlook, describing it as 'anachronism of the now defunct 90s PC era, a pre-web program written at a time when NT Server terrorized the data center landscape with the confidence of a T-Rex born to yuppie dinosaur parents who fully bought into the illusion of their son's utter uniqueness because the big-mouthed, tiny-armed monster infant could mimic the gestures of The Itsy-Bitsy Pterodactyl.'"
Wagging the dog. (Score:5, Insightful)
Another reasonable approach from might be to task, "How does our service need to change, in order for our own employees to want to use it?"
Re:Wagging the dog. (Score:5, Funny)
Expecting "reasonable" from Marissa Mayer's Yahoo is like expecting "class 1 laser emission" from Marisa Kirisame's Master Spark.
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Re:Wagging the dog. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Because they've got a lot of well-paid people whose job it is to get them in the news.
Welcome to the Press Release News Cycle.
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They're number 2, so they try harder.
(I don't know if you're old enough to get the reference).
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It's because everyone is so suprised they are still alive, and wondering what they are doing to make enough money to live.
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I've been told it's their ad platform that's making them their money. About the only thing I regularly use Yahoo! for is their OpenID services, which I really like for three main reasons: they're not Microsoft, they're not Apple, and they're not Google.
Re:Wagging the dog. (Score:5, Funny)
Another reasonable approach from might be to task, "How does our service need to change, in order for our own employees to want to use it?"
The more appropriate phrase in this case should be: "Eat Their Own Dog Poo".
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Only dogs do that!
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Actually, usually. Most dogs hate their own dog poo.
But they do love cat poo. Which in fact is probably a more apt analogy, anyway, because the new Yahoo Mail interface looks like they ate Gmail, had horrible indigestion, and then crapped out something vaguely resembling it.
Re:Wagging the dog. (Score:5, Informative)
My dog will eat any dog or cat poo except for his own.
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If my dog digs a hole in the yard, I sometimes shovel some of his poo in before filling it. Works pretty well, he doesn't want to go near it (otherwise he just considers it a game and digs the hole back up). I used to throw in some cayenne pepper, but now I think he's acquired a taste for that...
Re:Wagging the dog. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should the employees want to use it? "Eat your own dogfood" is a bad idea for your employees, unless you are creating a product intended for those types of employees. Is Yahoo Mail intended to be a corporate mail solution? If so then the employees should be encouraged to use it. If instead it is intended to be a general purpose web mail service, then it may be inappropriate for work.
Similarly, if my company made catheters I most certainly would object to be asked to use one while at work! Similarly, if I was creating a product intended for people with average to low technical aptitude (twitter, facebook) I would strongly object to be required to actually use that product all the time (I'd use it for testing purposes only). If I was at Google I would strenuously object to doing all my documentation by using Google Docs, or read mail via Google Mail, even if I was working on those products to make them better.
People are not cookie cutter clones!
Re:Wagging the dog. (Score:5, Insightful)
Google is intending to have their products used by companies that pay for the services. If Google Docs isn't good enough for internal Google employees to use, how can they expect paying customers to be happy with the same kind of service? I can see a section of users with multiple e-mail clients to keep an eye on the competition, but I don't think it would make 75% of employees.
What Yahoo(!) should really be asking is: what is it about Outlook that keeps people using it?
Re:Wagging the dog. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wagging the dog. (Score:4, Interesting)
I work at Google and I've never seen anyone here use anything besides gmail for corporate mail.
I know one who uses EMACS (Gnus, I think) for e-mail, but she's hardcore. And she still uses the web UI for many tasks.
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That's probably because gmail supports outlook, just tell it to fetch your email from pop.gmail.com:995 and you're golden.
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I don't use Outlook as a VCS either.
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Why would you want to use VBA if you could use Apps Script instead?
(Yes, Google Docs HAs a built in scripting language, too)
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As always force of habit is the major driver to keep using existing products. Especially considering M$ Outlook was better known as M$ Lookout for routine failures and data loss in the nineties, it is rather more reliable now. Getting accustomed to all the features of a calendering and scheduling program takes a reasonable effort, especially if you really want to make full use of it, unless there is a major reason to change, why would you.
The other perspective is, force your employees to use you deficien
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"section of users with multiple e-mail clients to keep an eye on the competition"
Lotus Notes baby!!!! (and Outlook)
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Funny enough I'm a very long time Yahoo mail user but I almost always use it with a rich client. What's good about Outlook:
a) Integrated calendars
b) Multiple integrated email accounts
c) Task management built in
d) Note taking built in
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As the article points out, the memo is encouraging the employees to use the "corporate version" of yahoo's mail client.
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Rtfs, they are the audience. Corporate version.
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The current incarnation of the Yahoo WebMail service is the worst webmail interface I've ever used. I don't blame the employees for avoiding it like the plague -- and I've had my Yahoo account for around a decade. This latest version is a serious step backwards. The icons make no sense, there are "hidden" popup activation areas all over the place, and it's uglier than sin.
I don't know what their "usability" department has been doing, but it sure as hell isn't researching what people might actually wan
Wrong metric (Score:2)
Re:Wagging the dog. (Yahoo - please read) (Score:3)
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I've used Outlook nearly my entire career and I don't see anything about it that makes it especially well suited to corporate use (at least as a user). In fact, I've never enjoyed using it. It's a mediocre product companies seem to use for the simple reason that nobody is going to get fired for picking Outlook. My guess is that these employees are just used to it and people hate change. I've never worked with anyone that's ever praised Outlook.
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Take outlook away, and see if anyone praises it. The killer app is not outlook, it is outlook + calendar integration, which is superior to all.
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I've generally found the people who make more than occasional use of calandering features are the most unproductive ones. I could entirely live without calandering myself.
Re:Wagging the dog. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well based on the memo it might be a good start to recognise that people don't really want to use web based tools for core tasks, particularly event based ones like e-mail. Webmail if fine and dandy for "check it once a day" type of e-mail communication, but corporate e-mail simply isn't that.
well...that certainly will follow... (Score:2)
what's the best way to motivate the yahoo mail team to improve their product? get a whole company of your peers to be irritated with the quality of your work and to offer constructive feedback.
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Another reasonable approach from might be to task, "How does our service need to change, in order for our own employees to want to use it?"
But they're right. The fact that most corporations STILL use outlook has more to do with the psychology of the staff than the actual utility of the application. Outlook sucks ass compared to even the most rudimentary webmail options out there. You have to pay for outlook! Yet any competent IT shop should be able to implement just about any open source web based mail app in a matter of weeks. Why pay millions to Microsoft when there are Free, better alternatives.
Lastly, maybe shes thinks that her staff will
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Web Apps (Score:5, Insightful)
Aren't the best solution to everything.
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Very true.
And while Outlook is very near worst of breed for email - yahoo webmail is not just webmail, it's probably the worst webmail available.
I dont blame their employees for not wanting to use it, I have used a yahoo email since just after they first went online, but I dont even bother log into it anymore after the last batch of forced regressions involved in their redesign.
On the one hand, if they dont use it, it obviously will never be fixed. They clearly dont listen to customer feedback in any way sh
What the hell is IN that dogfood? (Score:5, Funny)
when NT Server terrorized the data center landscape with the confidence of a T-Rex born to yuppie dinosaur parents who fully bought into the illusion of their son's utter uniqueness because the big-mouthed, tiny-armed monster infant could mimic the gestures of The Itsy-Bitsy Pterodactyl.
I think that dogfood's gone bad and grown some mushrooms. Also, how does a T-Rex imitate a Pterodactyl... flapping its little arms vainly?
Rawr.
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I read that all and in my mind filled in the words: "Still better than Yahoo web mail." Like someone else said here, instead of mandating the employees switch, they might want to spend a little time finding out why their employees won't, because unlike her Yahoo minions, Mayer can't tell anyone else what email client to use.
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Mixing metaphors is like beating dead horses into plowshares. Don't do it.
Microsoft Outlook is like capitalism (Score:2, Insightful)
The worst possible email client, except for all the rest.
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Democracy.
http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/364.html [quotationspage.com]
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All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less. [mutt.org]
web mail for enterprise? (Score:3, Interesting)
web mail for enterprise?
Re:web mail for enterprise? (Score:5, Insightful)
Gmail has been pretty successful.
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So is outlook for that matter. Outlook has inertia piles of it, Plenty of companies rolled it out as there first email and people have never know anything else.
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I work as support for a large number of small businesses and honestly it doesn't work very well there either. Every company we've worked with that had more than 5 people weren't happy with it for one reason or another. A very very large reason is having to have an internet connection unless you use a third party app (such as Outlook) or Chrome.
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I work at the University of Michigan and we use Gmail and Google apps. I'm not a big Gmail fan, but it's actually not bad for business use.
There are still people trying to use outlook as their client, but most people prefer Gmail now. It can work for large organizations.
It makes sense (Score:2)
Anyway, I understand why they should mandate using their own mail application and search engine. They'll discover quickly if those products hurt and they have an incentive to make them better.
Re:It makes sense (Score:4, Interesting)
They'll discover quickly that those products hurt and they have an incentive to make them better.
FTFY. Yahoo mail. Abysmal.
Every time I go there on the web, I am told to upgrade to a Firefox that has been optimized for Yahoo, and then I get told to pick a new theme. Every damn time.
At least the quality is consistently 'neo', both for groups and email.
cat turds are dogfood, according to many dogs (Score:2, Funny)
Next analogy down the pike: Marissa in the corner, licking her own balls.
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Wait what? Doesn't that make Yahoo the cat that laid the turd? Cats aren't particularly known for licking their own or others balls, especially not for the hell of it. They certainly do lick each other though.
Mail? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sure the employee's reaction was the same as everyone else's: Yahoo still has email?
Re:Mail? (Score:5, Interesting)
I actually use Yahoo Mail and have done for over ten years. It's always seemed like a good idea to me since I'll never use Yahoo for anything else (what else do they really do anyway?) while if I were to use something like GMail they'd be cross-referencing my emails with my searching habits with my Youtube viewing history and general browsing habits from the many many websites that use Google Ads.
Better to spread my info around into (relatively) remote morsels so that no one organisation knows everything about me.
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My primary personal email has been a Yahoo account since sometime in 2000. Everyone I know has it, it is de facto (correct spelling anyone? a suggestion was "ed-facto").
I take the changes in stride, I only wish that the freaking mail item list was always associated with Arrow-Up/Arrow-Down. Am I always wanting to see my Sent Items or Deleted Items folders???
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Yes, Yahoo still has an email thing. I know exactly one person who still uses it. And pays for it.
When reading the summary, I was sure that this:
... was going to read "gently lambasting staff who refuse to part with Gmail" and Yahoo was imploring their employees to switch to Yahoo! mail. As bad as Yahoo's mail system is, Outlook is worse. I figure 75% of Yahoo is sales people.
snooping (Score:2)
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They already run their own Exchange servers to power Outlook. There's nothing stopping them from snooping on corporate e-mail, no matter how you go about accessing it.
The second half of that summary was (Score:2)
verbal diarrhea. Is the submitter sick from eating dog food?
Yahoo Dogfood is Bing (Score:3)
What is the point of this? When I log in to yahoo email it takes forever to search because the bing search takes forever to load. If you type too quickly, you just see your whole inbox. So they criticize their employees to leave outlook and use Yahoo mail?
Not that outlook search is any better (can't find parts of a word), but this whole dogfood is serious. Maybe they should stop using Windows at work or using Office while their at it.
Right, Yahoo doesn't do search (Score:2)
Yahoo doesn't do search. They dumped the search engine years ago. Yahoo resells Bing, with Yahoo branding and ads.
News for who? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Microsoft Outlook, describing it as 'anachronism of the now defunct 90s PC era, a pre-web program written at a time when NT Server terrorized the data center landscape with the confidence of a T-Rex born to yuppie dinosaur parents who fully bought into the illusion of their son's utter uniqueness because the big-mouthed, tiny-armed monster infant could mimic the gestures of The Itsy-Bitsy Pterodactyl."
Individually the words make sense, but put them together and you can clearly see why Yahoo is where it is.
Knowing what I know about corporate life... (Score:5, Insightful)
... why do I suspect it'll be the managers who are the last to be dragged, kicking and screaming, from Outlook?
I use Yahoo mail and Outlook. Outlook definitely has its place, especially in a business. Tell me though, because I haven't looked: can Yahoo's calendar let you see everyone else's free time when inviting people to a meeting? As easily as Outlook does?
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It can, if you have a proper calendar server set up. The problem is most places I've been don't or the end user doesn't click the button to do so because they don't know it is there and don't have that set up as the default view because they don't know they can.
So, in other words: No, not by default. Outlook doesn't require user knowledge to set it up in a corporate environment with Exchange. It just runs and you are able to see other people's calendars when setting up an appointment. That is a huge advantage.
Who here wants to switch to another? (Score:3)
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I think the idea is that by using their own products, their employees are in a better position to know what needs to be changed or fixed. Which makes sense.
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And if these weren't paid employees, I'd agree with you. There's all kinds of things that employees in all industries don't *want* to do but are encouraged to. At least this one is more lenient with things (other than Apple, where anything but Apple products pretty much got you fired).
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Daaaamn, not even Yahoo employees want to use their email, it must suck.
Me: The point of this article is moot because it's got nothing to do with Yahoo's email sucking, it's that no one wants to change their email from where it is, and for a variety of reasons.
You: The article's point isn't moot because they get paid for working there. At least changing to Yahoo's email is optional unlike Apple.
You lost me. Why would their paycheck have any effect on them wanting to move their email to a
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I think you've hit on a major point. "Differentiation" is part of the problem. What the customer (in this case -- the Enterprise employee) wants is efficient access to email. Not ads, not cute graphics and sounds, not fancy colors or fancy guis, just to be able to pound through a pile of emails and easily save, reply forward, and send/receive attachments in some reasonably efficient fashion.
My mom was at one time sold on some dumb-ass email service called "incredimail", because it spoke to her and had cu
"Eat their own dog food?" (Score:2)
Clearly Marissa Mayer needs to study /b/ memes some more.
Obviously they can't find a decent alternative (Score:3)
I don't know if YaHoo mail, Hotmail or Gmail is any good, I use Forte Agent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort [wikipedia.org]é_Agent must copy and paste the é throws a loop.
and POP 3 my e-mail, everything to Gmail then to me. I use version Agent 1.93 (very old, very good).
I get no HTML mail, it's all in text unless I want to view it, I send no web beacons when
I read my mail. I send no it's been read replies.
It's the safest most secure e-mail system I've come across and been using it since Win 3.1.
None of my Email stays on a web service, and I have every email I've sent and received (for some reason).
Just saying YaHoo Pop 3 your email, you take the kool aide, yet they don't know of the outcome.
You use the YaHoo service but at your convince and in a secure fashion.
(Now I just hope Yahoo POP3's their Email, I got a Yahoo account when they were "Google" (before) but :} )
never use it
collect some requirements (Score:2)
domain specific software architecture or something
Right, but... (Score:2)
> The message goes on to take a swipe at what appears to be Yahoo employees' preferred mail client, Microsoft Outlook, describing it as 'anachronism of the now defunct 90s PC era, a pre-web program written at a time when NT Server terrorized the data center landscape with the confidence of a T-Rex born to yuppie dinosaur parents who fully bought into the illusion of their son's utter uniqueness because the big-mouthed, tiny-armed monster infant could mimic the gestures of The Itsy-Bitsy Pterodactyl.'
Um,
Be Taken Seriously (Score:2)
No one takes you seriously if you have a Yahoo email, even if you work for Yahoo.
The Yahoo staff need Eudora to get things done.
Re: Be Taken Seriously (Score:2, Insightful)
Eating dog food (Score:2)
I question whether any pet food manufacturers actually follow that philosophy.
Yahoo going downhill (Score:2)
I know why (Score:2)
Its because they are paid as well as Wallmart employees and can't afford real food, right?
They borked yahoo mail this past update (Score:3)
Obviously: (Score:2)
The take away message is that Yahoo itself admits that at least 25% of their employees eat dog food.
I can't believe that's by choice. Even the most of the furries I know don't do that just for fun. (Well, maybe the occasional Milkbone with Gnutella)
Is their pay really that poor?
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Most companies essentially mandate the use of Outlook and have MS Exchange as their back end.
As bad as Outlook is, it's still better than any webmail solution.
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Re:People use outlook? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:People use outlook? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, this is unfortunately quite true.
Our company would LOVE to migrate everyone away from Outlook and Exchange for multiple reasons. First and foremost, it encourages the use of the email system as an all purpose filing system, yet turns around and imposes severe limits on the number of objects it can handle before performance degrades and functions simply quit working properly. (I believe the speed and memory capacity of the client have some bearing on what the limit is for a particular user, but I've often heard recommendations to keep it under 1,000 or so objects per folder. That may sound like a lot until you realize people often have more than that in their Outlook calendar alone, if they've worked for the company for 4 or 5 years and never thought to try to delete any scheduled appointments or entries that happened in the past. Not only that, but recurring entries, such as "schedule my staff meeting every Wednesday at 1PM through the end of 2015" create separate entries for EACH occurrence!)
Regardless, there's really not much of anything out there that's provably better. Zimbra looks interesting as a possible web-based alternative? But mostly, people really like all of this data stored (or at least cached) locally on the computer running the client, for fast access and ability to work with everything even when offline. Combine that with the functionality Outlook/Exchange provides -- and it's a tall order to match or beat it with another product.
Re:People use outlook? (Score:4, Informative)
I think most of Yahoo's problems stem from the fact that the hire programmers that use Outlook?
Outlook is terrible.
It's still leaps and bounds better than any other option for a workplace.
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I think most of Yahoo's problems stem from the fact that the hire programmers that use Outlook?
Outlook is terrible.
It's still leaps and bounds better Ihan any other option for a workplace.
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26, 2013 @09:41AM (#45521113)
Yes, tons of people use Outlook. It's leaps and bounds better than Yahoo mail or any duct-taped together, freetard solution.
Trolling as AC as well, I see?
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Ballmer, shut the fuck up. You're meant to be enjoying retirement.
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Also, can you easily sync the calendar and contacts to your phone the way you can with Outlook?
*Note: I said EASILY! So your 75-step "here's how you do'er" can be consigned to the circular file.*
Personally, I don't use Outlook myself. I don't care for the client.
However, I only use webmail when I don't have access to my phone or one of my computers (see "seldom, if ever").
Also, please tell me how I peruse my old e-mail when my internet connection goes down or the provider has a service outage for a webmai
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Also, please tell me how I peruse my old e-mail when my internet connection goes down or the provider has a service outage for a webmail app.
I have a hard enough time doing that in outook when the network is up and running smoothly.
Seriously, 10 minutes to search an inbox with just a few tens of thousands of emails in it? I pretty much have to keep both outlook and OWA open so I can use each to work around the serious deficiencies of the other.
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