One Day The Internet Will Be Called Google

Fifteen months ago, when Marissa Mayer landed at Yahoo as its new CEO, she created a system to handle all of its employees' grievances, the things she felt were holding her workforce back from being super-productive.  In little over a year she has transformed the culture at Yahoo not by changing it but by making it 'the best version of itself'.  The success of this is seen as one of the key factors in Yahoo's stock price doubling.  Kudos.

It's incredibly positive and reassuring to know that the CEO of a company with 12,000 employees worldwide is actively observing and listening to them, they must feel valued.  Which makes it a surprise and a shame that Mayer doesn't hold the same level of respect for the 100 million+ people that actively use Yahoo Mail.

I am one of those users and recently I have been annoyed by the abrupt and total redesign of the Yahoo Mail interface.  There was no warning, I simply logged in as I have done every day for the last fifteen years, and was presented with a completely different mail set-up.  Through my early morning pre-caffeine state, it looked like this.

With all successful brands you expect a few tweaks along the way, it's what keeps a company current, and it wasn't unusual for Yahoo to have the occasional facelift or streamlining, all of which were easy to opt out of if you found them confusing or you could go back to the original settings that you were comfortable with via a couple of quick clicks but for some reason this current change came with no notice and no possible reversal. 

Thousands of Yahoo users have voiced their disapproval.  Even Change.org, usually the domain of global human rights outrages, has a petition decrying our very First World problem.  The major complaint is that it has become a clone of Google's email format, Gmail.  More than half the people up in arms are saying that if they wanted a Gmail account, they simply could have signed up for one, the fact they are using YahooMail is because they prefer its functionality so to be forced into using a Gmail clone is extremely annoying. 

The arrogance of this overhaul is inexplicable.  Why would you change something with a huge worldwide userbase without any beta testing or gradual roll-out to gauge customer reaction?  The Yahoo help pages are full of complaints and Yahoo-related webpages are saturated with protestations. 

The reality is, with over 100 million users, if a million people complain that's still less than one per cent of their customers so they may not feel pressure to act.  They also know as most people have been faithful to Yahoo they have years of email history saved on the Yahoo servers - are enough people going to go to the trouble of migrating to other email accounts for Yahoo to have to worry?  Won't most of them just 'shut up and put up' until they become painfully familiar with the new interface?

The similarity to Gmail is no coincidence.  Mayer came to Yahoo from Google.  As I said, integrating some of Google's ethics into the workplace have done wonders for the company's performance but actually turning some of their brands into Google clones may be her first mistake.  After all, we already have Google, we don't need another one.  Or is it all part of a bigger plan?  Is Mayer a double agent, still working for Google and slowly adapting the internet to fit in with their uniform?  You know how we all call a vacuum cleaner, a hoover?  Any photo manipulation is Photoshopping, any sticky-notes are Post-Its and, good grief, we never say we are going to look up something on an internet search engine, we say we are going to Google it!  They are already halfway there!  We are just a few short years away from referring to the whole of the internet as Google.  Complain about your Yahoo Mail account NOW.  You have been warned, it's Google's Earth, we just live in it.