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Subject:Re: Yahoo has no staff tech writers From:"Chuck Martin" <twriter -at- sonic -dot- net> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Wed, 9 Oct 2002 09:53:18 -0700
A few months ago, Yahoo asked publicly for feedback on their new home page
design. So I gave them some. I am sure they considered my comments about as
much as Microsoft did when I provided usability bugs when I was a beta
tester for Outlook 98.
Like many businesses, Yahoo!'s priorities have switched: instead of
providing the best and most useful search engine, their priority now is to
make money for their stockholders. So they place larger and more prominent
ads, charge for search engine placement, and charge more and more for more
and more non-search services. Meanwhile, people who need search engine
services are now turning to everyone else. I know my habit has switched from
Yahoo! to Google.
Buit I have one pretty firm conviction that this emphasis does not serve a
business' long-term interests well. I beleive that if you design a product
well, make it so that it best let's users reach their goals, then it will
become the market leader, and in turn make the profit, which in turn will
drive the stock price higher and provide thos oh-so-important dividends.
<bryan -dot- westbrook -at- amd -dot- com> wrote in message news:171714 -at- techwr-l -dot- -dot- -dot-
>
> Personally, I think Yahoo's site shows that much of it was designed by
non-writers. Parts of their system are horrible to navigate, and don't even
get me started on their lack of accessibility. On that issue I will say,
however, that the last time I ran a Bobby scan of their homepage
<http://www.yahoo.com> it had a priority 1 violation on the first element of
the page. If you can't see that image map, you cannot get find the Help
section from that page.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chuck Martin [mailto:twriter -at- sonic -dot- net]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 09, 2002 2:13 AM
> To: TECHWR-L
> Subject: Yahoo has no staff tech writers
>
> tech writers of staff. The person said that they either hire contractors
> when they need some writing done or they just have engineers write
content.
>
> I was rendered pretty much speechless.
>
>
>
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