The July 20, 2016
PinFeed Almanack
An Open Letter to Yahoo

  
  Under the category of better-late-than-never:  The Almanack obsesses over 
  things that are qwerty, but occasionally, a dramatic example of anti-qwertyness 
  catches our attention.  So it is with Yahoo.
  
  Yahoo is an organization that should be competing for 'good enough' in many 
  sectors.  It's not as old as AOL or Vista, but it was early on the scene, and 
  it was a vast improvement over its predecessors.  It's not a giant, by Silicon 
  Valley standards, but it is certainly large, and smaller armies have shown 
  critical mass.  Its mail client is as good as any and better than most, as is 
  its search engine.  The old, wonderfully flexible Yahoo home page anticipated 
  the Droid interface by more than a decade, and it put just what you want in 
  front of your face.  Yahoo finance is a slicker tool than what most of the 
  brokerages offer. 
  
  So why is Yahoo for sale, searching for a White Knight, a savior, an identity?
  
  We don't have a team of investment bankers or business analysts to call upon, 
  but a wild guess from the sidelines is the strategic team went looking for a 
  Big Score.  Because we are not investment professionals, and we do not know the 
  individuals involved, there is no point in mulling over the deals that didn't 
  pay off.  But we do have some strong opinions about how Yahoo could make, an 
  honest living playing 'small ball'. 
  
  Don't compete with Google or Amazon, cooperate with them.  Focus on the 
  end-user.  Get rid of the awful chaos of the new home page, delight us with a 
  slick page of news streams, entertainment, game portals, social links, 
  financial links, and time-sucks that we can manage.  If you run out of things 
  to offer, ask a hundred millenials.  Drill into money-holes like Amazon and 
  iTunes and PlayStore with one-click pass-through, but keep the user in 
  control.  Make it so easy to set up the page an 84-year-old can do it, and 
  secure the hell out of it all, because WE DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO IT OURSELVES.  
  
  After 25 years of access to the Web, we still don't have a decent password 
  manager.  Give us one that keeps all our passwords, for all our devices, not 
  just one-browser-at-a-time.  The new phoneclick-signon is clever, arrogantly 
  Yahoo-specific, a solution in search of a problem. 
  
  There aren't many entities we trust, analog or digital.  So far, Yahoo is not 
  compromised, just schizoid.  Get sane, get cool again, make us believe we can 
  trust you with our secrets. 
  
  P.S.:  
  
  For those of us who have dreams of bloggerdom, sell us a good, cheap, 
  do-it-yourself or do-it-with-help or do-it-with-tools website with our own name 
  and address on it.  Take care of the silly accounting and housekeeping, make it 
  easy to find stuff, and sell it at cost plus a few cents.  You'll make a 
  fortune.
  
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