All Of A Sudden, I’m Rooting For The Microsoft/Yahoo Merger

How much do you have to suck so that being merged into Microsoft will improve your service? About as much as Yahoo does.

I’ve been managing a site for several years that was hosted on one of their Web site hosting plans. It’s a simple site with a few interactive features that worked well enough. Miva mail handled the forms, and everything else was flat files. Well at the beginning of the year they discontinued that plan and placed us into a new one.

It’s amazing how positively primitive the features are. All we really need, still, is a form handler. What they gives you handles a form, but in a way that brings back the heady days of blink tags. The user fills out the form and is sent to a raw black-and-white text page that regurgitates the form fields. There’s an option to send them to a thank-you page, but not to specify who gets the responses. The results come back in an attachment, not the body of the e-mail, and without a file suffix. It’s going to be fun to explain to the nontechnical people who are going to read these how to open them in Windows.

It’s the lamest thing I’ve seen in years, and in an age when Google is breaking the coolness barrier every week, it’s mystifying why they would settle for it.

And best of all here is a segment from the instructions:

If you’re like me you’re intrigued by the “for more help on how to copy and paste” link. How much more help could one possibly need on copying and pasting?

Nice touch, the scrollbars. The javascript link that pops up the instructions has the width and height hard-coded, and includes the no-resize command so you can’t drag out the window wide enough to read without vertical and horizontal scrolling if you want to.

It’s really sad. I remember when Yahoo was the coolest thing going. Now they’re just going backwards, putting up for-pay services that millions of high school kids could outdo. Getting absorbed into MSN will be a step up.