i sent the following note to a friend of mine. Then i realized i don't work there anymore and can be a bit more open about these sorts of things.
Can you have everyone in brand marketing fired please?
Allow me to elaborate:
The Monday after OpenHack, i took a look on technorati for posts talking about it. i found a few, all of which share a rather notable trait:
http://www.hackingnetflix.com/2008/09/yahoo-uses-netf.html
http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/09/12/yahoo-kicks-off-open-hack-day-today/
http://www.pcworld.com/article/150993/.html?tk=rss_news
http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Open_Hack_Day%3A_New_Open_Strategy_Makes_Yahoo_Like_Facebook
Sum total: 1 comment.
(Ok, two. One was from some idiot script kiddie selling passwords.)
In the mean time, we've got:
http://startwearingpurple.yahoo.com/
a site that encourages you to buy purple sneakers.
Now, correct me if i'm wrong, but i do believe that increasing sales for purple sneakers and USB fobs wasn't one of Jerry's Big Bets for the survival of Yahoo! as a company. Certainly not enough to warrant generating a flash site that's just slightly less annoying than a WebKinz, and quite possibly even less useful.
One of the reasons that people aren't talking about Y!OS is because they have absolutely no clue what the hell Y!OS is. Hack Day didn't really help because it was inviting a bunch of folks into a closed tent and whispering it to them. We need to have folks with bullhorns screaming about this and not how Marissa enjoys playing mariachi music while drinking grape kool-aide.
Sorry if i'm being overly cranky, but do feel free to pass this along.
Mind you, i have a long standing hate relationship with Yahoo! Brand, who's steadfast guardianship of the mighty Yahoo! Brand lead to such staggeringly good ideas as "Life Engine", laughably horrid audio-video equipment, and a host of other decisions that pretty much all failed worse than a creationist taking a medical exam.
This is just one more of those.
Honestly, the company would be far better off if they just rounded up the entire department, put them in a paper bag and dropped them off in the wetlands somewhere.
With any luck, they'll be consumed by ducks.
