I think Yahoo's brand perception differs depending on the audience.
The HN crowd seems to be pretty tired of Yahoo. I know I am. I'm disappointed that they never made a good Flickr mobile app, and sad about what Yahoo did with del.icio.us. A few years ago, those were two of my favorite web services. No longer.
Other issues: the quality of Yahoo Answers is a running joke. Yahoo Groups sorely needs to be remodeled, but their 2010 attempt was a miserable failure. Some people are still sore about what happened to GeoCities.
Issues like these set expectations among a certain audience. I admit I don't expect Yahoo to hit a home run these days.
Yet there are people (non-techy folks) in my family who have used Yahoo for over ten years for their mail, news, and search. When they've had problems, I've tried to talk them into switching to something better, but they like Yahoo. So there you go.
To each their own. But after my recent poor experiences with Yahoo, I don't feel guilty that my expectations are set low. I'm not rooting for them to fail, but I can't help feeling fairly cynical about them.
These days I still find many general knowledge questions (i.e. non-technical) being redirected from Google to an entry in Y! Answers. These are not strongly affected by time, so I suppose it's still playing a role (even if only as an archive)
The HN crowd seems to be pretty tired of Yahoo. I know I am. I'm disappointed that they never made a good Flickr mobile app, and sad about what Yahoo did with del.icio.us. A few years ago, those were two of my favorite web services. No longer.
Other issues: the quality of Yahoo Answers is a running joke. Yahoo Groups sorely needs to be remodeled, but their 2010 attempt was a miserable failure. Some people are still sore about what happened to GeoCities.
Issues like these set expectations among a certain audience. I admit I don't expect Yahoo to hit a home run these days.
Yet there are people (non-techy folks) in my family who have used Yahoo for over ten years for their mail, news, and search. When they've had problems, I've tried to talk them into switching to something better, but they like Yahoo. So there you go.
To each their own. But after my recent poor experiences with Yahoo, I don't feel guilty that my expectations are set low. I'm not rooting for them to fail, but I can't help feeling fairly cynical about them.