Even Yahoo Employees Want Nothing To Do With Yahoo Mail

If you’re one of the many Yahoo users (Yahoosers?) who hasn’t been terribly impressed with the numerous recent “upgrades” to the web giant’s e-mail service, you’re not alone, especially in the Yahoo offices, were 3-out-of-4 employees have apparently decided to just stick with Microsoft Outlook, in spite of the company’s pleas to switch.

AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher got her hands on a memo sent to Yahoo employees by the company’s Chief Information Officer and a Sr. VP of Communications, in which the execs basically beg employees to break up with the boring but safe Blaine McDonnagh that is Outlook and please, please see that they should really be falling for the Duckie Dale of Yahoo mail.

“Earlier this year we asked you to move to Yahoo Mail for your corporate email account,” reads the message. “25% of you made the switch (thank you). But even if we used the most generous of grading curves (say, the one from organic chemistry), we have clearly failed in our goal to move our co-workers to Yahoo Mail.”

The memo calls it a “matter of principle to use the products we make,” adding “BTW, same for Search,” which implies that most Yahoo employees have the same feeling about Yahoo search as the general public.

“[Y]ou might now be running in your head to a well worn path of justified resistance, phoning up the ol’ gang, circling the hippocampian wagons of amygdalian resistance,” continues the memo, no doubt causing countless Yahoo workers to search on Google or Wikipedia to understand that last sentence.

The memo then goes on, trying — much like an overeager suitor mocking his object of affection’s current love interest — to show how much cooler Yahoo is than stupid ol’ Outlook:

First, it doesn’t feel like we are asking you to abandon some glorious place of communications nirvana. At this point in your life, Outlook may be familiar, which we can often confuse with productive or well designed. Certainly, we can admire the application for its survival, an anachronism of the now defunct 90s PC era, a pre-web program written at a time when NT Server terrorized the data center landscape with the confidence of a T-Rex born to yuppie dinosaur parents who fully bought into the illusion of their son’s utter uniqueness because the big-mouthed, tiny-armed monster infant could mimic the gestures of The Itsy-Bitsy Pterodactyl. There was a similar outcry when we moved away from Outlook’s suite-mates in the Microsoft Office dreadnaught. But whether it’s familiarity, laziness or simple stubbornness dressed in a cloak of Ayn Randian Objectivism, the time has come to move on, commrade [sic...go deep in this pun, it is layered].

At this point, everyone at Yahoo is probably reminded why they get picked on by the cool kids at Google when they run into them at the mall.

The letter praises all the features of using the Yahoo Mail service for corporate e-mail accounts — basically all stuff you can do in Outlook and numerous other suites — but then slips in the note that, oh yeah, “corp mail is not yet supported in our Mail app for Android or iOS, but that will change.”

So the company wants everyone to switch to a mail service that isn’t yet mobile-friendly? That’s like the aforementioned suitor telling the girl he adores that “Okay, so I do currently live in my mom’s basement, but I swear I’m going to move out soon!”

We wonder how many of the Yahoo employees that received this memo then immediately used their Gmail accounts to forward it to their friends, or to apply for jobs elsewhere.

by Chris Morran via Consumerist