Dogfood
November 25, 2013 1:30 PM   Subscribe

You 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. Hold on a sec, pilgrim. Yahoo urges its employees to switch from using outlook to Yahoo Mail in a bizare internal email. Meanwhile, as Microsoft abandons the hated practice of stack ranking Yahoo adopts it as its own.  But hey, they have Katie Couric now!
posted by Artw (84 comments total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
Both Outlook and Yahoo mail blow, they just blow in different ways. There's no one to root for here.
posted by tommasz at 1:32 PM on November 25, 2013 [4 favorites]


I use Yahoo mail. I had to switch from the new version to classic because there does not appear to be any way to browse your deep history. Instead of going to page 200 and checking the date, the only way to browse older emails is to keep scrolling down so they auto-load, which eventually crashes the browser.
posted by localroger at 1:34 PM on November 25, 2013 [3 favorites]


But hey, they have Katie Couric now!

Stack ranking is bad but Katie Couric would be the deal breaker for me.
posted by doctor_negative at 1:34 PM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


Related (and my sentiments exactly on the Couric issue)

James Poniewozik: Couric to Yahoo: Why Hire a Broadcaster in a Narrowcasting World?

And that internal email is like a parody of corporate culture internal emails.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 1:34 PM on November 25, 2013


My former boss was talking about how much stack ranking at Microsoft has hurt their better teams. "You're all excellent and work together well, but now we have to fire 10% of you, replace you with unknown quantities, and slow everyone down while you train the new blood."
posted by Foosnark at 1:35 PM on November 25, 2013 [17 favorites]


Yahoo still exists?
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 1:35 PM on November 25, 2013 [5 favorites]


Stack ranking: I don't have to outrun the bear; I just have to outrun you.
posted by Etrigan at 1:36 PM on November 25, 2013 [17 favorites]


Stack ranking: I don't have to outrun the bear; I just have to outrun you.

Stack ranking: I don't have to outrun the bear; I just have to cut your Achilles tendon to ensure that I can outrun you.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 1:42 PM on November 25, 2013 [30 favorites]


Outlook may be familiar, which we can often confuse with productive or well designed.... an anachronism of the now defunct 90s PC era, a pre-web program written at a time when NT Server terrorized the data center...

I have no email client loyalty - like, seriously, none - other than not wanting to deal with transferring my email archives. However, one major feature we seem to have casually thrown away with this transition to the glorious "new" world of web mail over native clients is the local copy. If our office network connection goes out, or I have to work on the train, or whatever else, I have all my email right up until the time I disconnected, readily accessible via Outlook. My personal webmail? Not So Much. I don't know why you'd want to force your employees to abandon that advantage.

(Or maybe Yahoo doesn't care at this point - since you're no longer allowed to work from home, maybe it's presumed you're always in the office.)
posted by Joey Buttafoucault at 1:46 PM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


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.

It is one of the great tragedies of my life that I cannot claim credit for writing this memo. It's beautiful.
posted by WidgetAlley at 1:46 PM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


I try not to think about Yahoo mail lest I taste gritty splinters of my teeth.
posted by BrotherCaine at 1:47 PM on November 25, 2013 [4 favorites]


Katie Couric left CBS? When was this?
posted by Pudhoho at 1:50 PM on November 25, 2013


It seems to me that the main problem with eating your own dog food is that you are eating dog food.
posted by ckape at 1:52 PM on November 25, 2013 [18 favorites]


It is one of the great tragedies of my life that I cannot claim credit for writing this memo. It's beautiful.

I can confidently say I'd be looking to leave that company on the email's writing style alone. The combination of folksy with meth addict sets of major alarm bells for me.
posted by Artw at 1:52 PM on November 25, 2013 [25 favorites]


Now there's somebody who has obviously never read Stunk and White.
posted by entropicamericana at 1:53 PM on November 25, 2013 [4 favorites]


I'm surprised that yahoo employees even have a choice. Usually IT covertly installs a new email dictatorship and that's that.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 1:56 PM on November 25, 2013 [3 favorites]


The combination of folksy with meth addict sets of major alarm bells for me.

Yahoo is the email that knocks.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 1:56 PM on November 25, 2013 [3 favorites]


Yahoo is going to be the 1999's most exciting tech company, I'd bet my flooz on it.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 1:56 PM on November 25, 2013 [11 favorites]


Pullquote from the Couric article: "I've always respected Katie for her thoughtful, charismatic approach to journalism"

How do you approach something charismatically? Mayer really needs to fire the top 25% or so of her communications department.
posted by Aizkolari at 1:57 PM on November 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


It's good that people are dumping stack ranking, but they'll just come up with something equally clueless to replace it with.
posted by JHarris at 1:58 PM on November 25, 2013


I'm pretty shocked that Yahoo hasn't always been using their own email system for mail. Dog-fooding is just good product practice and I'm pretty sure that the other three big email system providers use their own system.
posted by octothorpe at 1:58 PM on November 25, 2013 [3 favorites]


Today I learned that the CIO of Yahoo cannot afford a spelchequer.

Meritocracy my ass.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 1:58 PM on November 25, 2013 [3 favorites]


ckape: That's the whole idea.

If you just feed it to the dogs, it tastes like shit. If you eat it yourself you are going to feed the dogs the good stuff.

In theory.

I am also sad that I do not understand the yuppie trex who think he is a pterodactyl.
posted by aspo at 1:58 PM on November 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


Wow. That's a hell of a memo. It's... It's wonderful. It puts the MSFT classic shrimp and weenies memo to shame for sheer wtf-ness.

I'll be curious to see what stack ranking does for - or rather to - Yahoo. Having worked at MSFT for almost 6 years back in the day, I am firmly convinced that stack ranking is the reason that MSFT products are broken in the way that they are.

(Shiny new = review numbers that come with stock options at a time when they were worth real $$. Fixing bugs and making old stuff work is not shiny new, so you get crap. Together, that's a *hell* of a financial incentive to ignore broken shit and come up with some new fancy crap.)
posted by rmd1023 at 1:59 PM on November 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


The combination of folksy with meth addict sets of major alarm bells for me.

They've hired Sarah Palin, also?
posted by octobersurprise at 2:00 PM on November 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


> Yahoo still exists?

Not only. It's also become the mail provider for people with AT&T as their ISP, and people who got inherited by AT&T from other ISPs. (Mine used to be bellsouth.net because that was who you got if you wanted DSL in Athens GA.)

For a while there if you showed up at Yahoo mail with scripts blocked it would offer to send you to the palaeolithic interface that didn't depend on javascript. No more. Last time I tried I encountered the "you gotta upgrade and there's no going back" page.

I didn't try. It swears "nothing will be downloaded to your PC" and I'm curious to test that, so I'm preparing software that will take and compare before and after snapshots of my boot drive and tell me about any differences. Cue Ghostbusters theme--There's somethin' new... in the neighborhood... somethin' strange... an' it don't look good...
posted by jfuller at 2:01 PM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


If you just feed it to the dogs, it tastes like shit. If you eat it yourself you are going to feed the dogs the good stuff.

If you just feed it to the dogs, it tastes like shit. If you force-feed it to your employees, they are going to get used to the taste of shit. Which you will be feeding them much more of before you finally close down.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 2:01 PM on November 25, 2013 [4 favorites]


Gmail is literally the only email interface I've ever used and not hated. You might say "So you only started not hating using email in 2004? What, it was a pain in the ass before them?"

And yeah, I'd say so. The grouping into conversations is amazing, the spam filter is so good that I keep forgetting that spam is a thing, and labels are superior in literally every way to folders. The school I work for forces faculty and staff onto Cyrus or Exchange, and offers students university-branded Gmail or Livemail, and the Gmail system, aside from the odd "hey, I need help setting this up" Just Works. I can't imagine going back to Yahoo or Hotmail or whatever else.
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:02 PM on November 25, 2013 [7 favorites]


Foci for Analysis: "I'm surprised that yahoo employees even have a choice. Usually IT covertly installs a new email dictatorship and that's that."

My previous job kindly kept IMAP turned on on Exchange so that a few us miscreants could use Thunderbird or Mutt or Pine for mail. No such luck on calendering though, Outlook was your only choice there.
posted by octothorpe at 2:03 PM on November 25, 2013


Ayn Rand, dinosaurs, cowboy speak...with the lucidity of a Sarah Palin speech. Does this guy ghost-write speeches for the GOP?
posted by Chuffy at 2:03 PM on November 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


I'm shocked, shocked, that anyone wouldn't leap at the chance to switch to a new mail client that failed to actually replace all of Outlook's functionality.

Yeah, it's great to see them openly admit that their dogfood isn't as nutritious as the rest of the email claims it is.
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:04 PM on November 25, 2013


I think the real worry isn't that you end up with the employees liking the taste of cat-poo. What you end up is dogfood that tastes good because it's full of chocolate, and then you start feeding it to the dogs you end up with a lot of dead dogs and mad owners.
posted by aspo at 2:06 PM on November 25, 2013 [4 favorites]


I'm... not sure where this metaphor is going, aspo.
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:06 PM on November 25, 2013 [4 favorites]


It's going to the dogs. Duh.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 2:08 PM on November 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


Stack ranking: I don't have to outrun the bear; I just have to outrun you.

Stack ranking: I don't have to outrun the bear; I just have to cut your Achilles tendon to ensure that I can outrun you.


Stack ranking : Who gives a shit about the bear; I'm getting the fuck out of dodge.
posted by fullerine at 2:14 PM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


It's going to the yuppie pterodactyls.
posted by aspo at 2:17 PM on November 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


They seem to have missed the point of dogfooding. You make everyone use it, then you find the pain points, then you fix them yourselves because your employees are screaming at you. Then your actual customers are happier.
posted by smackfu at 2:17 PM on November 25, 2013 [6 favorites]


Oh, you few who amygdalate with J. Wayne caught-phrases, can you not Rand the futility of your dogfood ding! Pavlov's on the stove, squirrel! what's that? addiction to your commikaze (dig that for slathering on the puns) ammunition when you are, in fact, the ammo?
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 2:18 PM on November 25, 2013 [14 favorites]



Gmail is literally the only email interface I've ever used and not hated. You might say "So you only started not hating using email in 2004? What, it was a pain in the ass before them?"


Gmail has a user interface, and a user experience, and features, and EVERYTHING that can be changed at the whim of google engineers without me having any say or control.

If I can't access a service using my own "client" which I control; and at least be able to keep untouchable copies of all my data on my own machine, then that service is dead to me.

See apple/android apps, plexi, adobe cloud, and all the pay per swing hammer asshole coders and companies that have ruined computing for millions and millions of people.
posted by lalochezia at 2:20 PM on November 25, 2013 [18 favorites]


I was actually talking about this with a friend and it reminded me of many of the failing tech companies I've worked at where they instituted mandatory use of our products because usually:

1. Something was horrendously and obviously broken or bad with our terrible product
2. However, saying something like that would offend or hurt the feelings of the wrong person
3. Anyway nobody wanted to hear that because you were being negative
4. So the product continued being bad while everyone knew it was bad but nobody could say anything
5. Because you would piss off or upset the wrong person

Thus forming an endless, sucking loop that lasted until the company went out of business.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 2:20 PM on November 25, 2013 [5 favorites]


It's a dog eat dog food world at Yahoo.
posted by Pudhoho at 2:24 PM on November 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


What I want to know is, can we get this guy and the quidnunc kid together to create a political party?
posted by WidgetAlley at 2:26 PM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


I actually don't mind the new @outlook. It's fairly clean, with some sharp lines, and easy enough to navigate. Nothing wrong with it. Six Ballmers.
posted by turbid dahlia at 2:29 PM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


The memo banning work from home is far less fun and doesn't have anything about dinosaurs or folksy threats to stab you.
posted by Artw at 2:29 PM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


If I can't access a service using my own "client" which I control; and at least be able to keep untouchable copies of all my data on my own machine, then that service is dead to me.

You can totally do that with Gmail. The interface will be shit, because it's an email client and for some reason all email clients are godawful.
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:32 PM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


The combination of folksy with meth addict sets of major alarm bells for me.

They've hired Sarah Palin, also?


She can see Rob Ford from her house.
posted by jaduncan at 2:38 PM on November 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


Do you guys smell smoke?
posted by petebest at 2:39 PM on November 25, 2013


It's more readable than the endless Optima logo blog post.
posted by benzenedream at 3:09 PM on November 25, 2013


I'm surprised that yahoo employees even have a choice. Usually IT covertly installs a new email dictatorship and that's that.

One upside to web-based programs is that IT has a lot less power to control which programs you use.
posted by straight at 3:31 PM on November 25, 2013


Do you guys smell smoke?

I blame the pork meatballs we had last night.
posted by smoke at 3:34 PM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


Re: Gmail, pope, they sure are trying to hard to piss become at typical email client with all the arbitrary changes that user are opted in to and in some cases can't opt out of, e.g That bullshit new compose window, the dumb layout change that despite being "cleaner" actually takes three times longer to load on our shitty broadband compared to the old one, etc etc.

Why do people keep fucking with stuff, honesty? Like Microsoft did it with Vista which was a collosall fuck-up, got back on track with Windows 7 - which was a marginal improvement, basically a jazzed up XP (which is all that anyone wanted), and now have done it again with Windows 8.

Don't get me started on the new office UX.
posted by smoke at 3:37 PM on November 25, 2013 [4 favorites]


Yahoo still exists?

Ah, so it's not just AOL that gets this.
posted by empath at 3:44 PM on November 25, 2013


I didn't try. It swears "nothing will be downloaded to your PC" and I'm curious to test that, so I'm preparing software that will take and compare before and after snapshots of my boot drive and tell me about any differences. Cue Ghostbusters theme--There's somethin' new... in the neighborhood... somethin' strange... an' it don't look good...

This is a kind of insane amount of paranoia, frankly.
posted by empath at 3:45 PM on November 25, 2013 [3 favorites]


This is a strange email. I assume their reasoning is: "if a Yahoo product is actually used by Yahoo employees, it will improve faster". Would have been more effective to say that, methinks. But then I'm not in corporate communications.
posted by Triplanetary at 3:46 PM on November 25, 2013


I am in corporate communications, and I can tell you it's really bizarre. I am always pushing execs to welcome a little humanity and character into their emails, but this goes so very far beyond that. It's the kind of shit a clueless twenty-two year old in an agency would give us.

The thing about wackiness is you have to acknowledge that the further out you go, the smaller audience it plays to. This is why corporate wackiness is usually so watered down - you have to ensure it catches all the sticks-in-the-mud/fuddy duddies as well as the Gen Y hipsters. A little generally goes a very long way, and even a soupcon will usually result in a few huffy replies back.

This is especially the case where there is a perceived gap between rhetoric (cutting edge! Hip funny jokes!) and the reality of the organisation or business unit. It only increases employee distrust and a feeling of disconnect between them and management. I have no idea if Yahoo's internal corporate tone and culture is like that email, but I doubt it. They also missed their opportunity for the best proof point - was that note sent using YahooMail?

Additionally, behaviour change is incredibly challenging to engender from a comms perspective. Indeed, behaviour change comes from rules, not requests, I'm sorry to say. There is almost never a compelling case to change, so people don't if given a choice.

If you force them to, with plenty of notice, resources, and proof points, they hate it, but grudgingly accept it. Yahoo should have removed Outlook entirely - but with a lead time of several months, and ensured that no critical dependencies (like delegating ffs) were dropped. Also, employees aren't interested in trying new things, it slows them down and disrupts their workflow. The best proof point is "you can do everything you used to/will barely notice the difference".

I've worked on internal comms projects similar to this with audiences of tens of thousands of employees, that's not how I would go about it. And I definitely would not have communicated that only 25% have adopted - that's a proof point against adoption.
posted by smoke at 4:02 PM on November 25, 2013 [16 favorites]


The sarcasm and passive aggression and condescension is piled high and deep on this one.
posted by Halogenhat at 4:14 PM on November 25, 2013


Gmail is literally the only email interface I've ever used and not hated. You might say "So you only started not hating using email in 2004? What, it was a pain in the ass before them?"

Every company I've worked for (in tech, no less) used/uses Lotus Notes. I'd kill for Outlook or Yahoo mail.
posted by Mister Fabulous at 4:16 PM on November 25, 2013 [5 favorites]


We just switched from Notes to Outlook and it's heaven on Earth.
posted by rfs at 4:24 PM on November 25, 2013 [4 favorites]


Outlook is the worst email client I have ever seen. Hands down. (Well, maybe Eudora was worse. But I think Eudora was actively designed to be hostile to users.)

Every time I am forced to use Outlook at work I grit my teeth. We use it because it allows people to "un-send" an email. This is a bad, bad thing, not least because it only works if everyone involved is using Outlook on an Exchange server. It s a bad thing because it teaches people they can send anything with impunity and recall it in case of mistake or embarrassment.

But asking people to move from a desktop client to a web interface? WTF. I don't use a webmail interface on my desktop because I am on a fucking desktop. Web interface is for accessing my mail on a computer I don't own. My coworkers use web interfaces all the time and I do not understand why. Local copies of everything, everything is searchable and indexed by the OS, better handling of attachments, integration with the same system address book that is transparently synced to every other device I own. Why would I give that up for an interface designed to feed me ads?

And dedicated mail apps on mobile... I don't get that either. I use the mail app baked into the mobile OS. If your mobile OS mail app is so bad that you install another mail app, maybe you should find a different mobile OS instead?
posted by caution live frogs at 4:26 PM on November 25, 2013 [4 favorites]


God that makes me feel old
posted by caution live frogs at 4:26 PM on November 25, 2013


Lalochezia, does gmail not allow POP and IMAP any more? I thought they pretty much let you bring your own client.
posted by BrotherCaine at 4:27 PM on November 25, 2013


I wonder if we can get Michael Shannon to read this, like he did with that sorority email.
posted by happyroach at 4:32 PM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


asking people to move from a desktop client to a web interface? WTF

I know where you're coming from, I used to feel the same way. But then I found that I can actually get things done more quickly in Gmail than Outlook, and I never looked back.

Local copies of everything

That's the ONE thing I occasionally miss. But honestly, not that often. Maybe if I were traveling and writing emails on flights, but I usually just read and sleep through flights and deal with email when I land. I realize that's not a solution for everyone, though. On the other hand, I use quite a few computers and it's nice not having to use a specific one to get the features I want.

everything is searchable and indexed by the OS

I find searching much quicker in Gmail than it ever was in Outlook. Everything is indexed by Google, and it works incredibly well for me. And I used to run doozies of searches in Outlook - searching across multiple PSTs etc.

better handling of attachments

Again, for me, I find the opposite to be true. Gmail handles attachments much better than Outlook. In the first place, it lets me avoid them entirely - I can view documents or open them in Drive without actually downloading them. This is more secure, and quicker, and I don't have to worry about deleting cruft from my desktop. Second, I can save them to Drive and have them sync with one or more desktops.

integration with the same system address book that is transparently synced to every other device I own

Well, if you drink the Google koolaid, you get this as well. My address book is synced across every device I have, without me having to actually do anything.
posted by me & my monkey at 4:37 PM on November 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


> This is a kind of insane amount of paranoia, frankly.

I do understand. Not only do some folks not mind the UFIA, some don't even want to know about it.
posted by jfuller at 4:49 PM on November 25, 2013


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.
HELP

I AM NO LONGER SATISFIED

AS I WAKE, HEAVENLY VISIONS DANCE BEFORE MY EYES, AND, TO MY INFINITE MISERY, I HAVE NO TIME TO DESCRIBE THEM BEFORE I SLEEP

THEY DO NOT INCLUDE YUPPIE PTERODACTYLS

IF I MUST BE DAMNED TO IMAGINE, I MUST BE FIRED FOR IT

YET I RETAIN MY EMPLOYMENT

HELP
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 5:13 PM on November 25, 2013 [3 favorites]


Mister Fabulous: "Every company I've worked for (in tech, no less) used/uses Lotus Notes. I'd kill for Outlook or Yahoo mail."

I'm so sorry. Notes is really the strangest large scale software product that I've ever used. Not to say that it isn't bad too but it's just plain weirdness really overshadows its badness. It seems to have been designed by people who have heard about user interfaces but never actually seen one in person.
posted by octothorpe at 5:13 PM on November 25, 2013 [7 favorites]


>the only way to browse older emails is to keep scrolling down so they auto-load, which eventually crashes the browser.

Ditto Flickr. Ditto Tumblr. Ditto formspring. Et cetera et cetera. I miss Flickr especially. Some idiot in senior management thinks "this looks cool" and breaks the site.
posted by EnterTheStory at 5:20 PM on November 25, 2013 [7 favorites]


For a while there if you showed up at Yahoo mail with scripts blocked it would offer to send you to the palaeolithic interface that didn't depend on javascript. No more. Last time I tried I encountered the "you gotta upgrade and there's no going back" page.

I didn't try. It swears "nothing will be downloaded to your PC" and I'm curious to test that, so I'm preparing software that will take and compare before and after snapshots of my boot drive and tell me about any differences. Cue Ghostbusters theme--There's somethin' new... in the neighborhood... somethin' strange... an' it don't look good...
Is this like the Internet equivalent of chemtrails?
posted by deathpanels at 6:49 PM on November 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


Apparently Rob Ford isn't the only one smoking crack.
posted by varion at 6:58 PM on November 25, 2013


This is especially the case where there is a perceived gap between rhetoric (cutting edge! Hip funny jokes!) and the reality of the organisation or business unit. It only increases employee distrust and a feeling of disconnect between them and management.

So THAT'S why every time I hear a middle-aged manager float the idea that we should try doing one of those flashmobs I want to bang my head against the wall until I black out!
posted by Ndwright at 7:28 PM on November 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


smoke: "That bullshit new compose window, the dumb layout change that despite being "cleaner" actually takes three times longer to load on our shitty broadband compared to the old one, etc etc. "

In Chrome or Firefox, you can use Gmelius to get the old compose window back, plus a lot of other nice tweaks.
posted by Chrysostom at 7:31 PM on November 25, 2013 [5 favorites]


So THAT'S why every time I hear a middle-aged manager float the idea that we should try doing one of those flashmobs I want to bang my head against the wall until I black out!

I've shared this before on here but my favorite meeting of this kind was one where the question "What do tween girls like?" came up in a room full of very male, very 30s, very neckbearded types. After a moment of horrified silence, they all began pontificating at once in that "nerd that cannot admit to not knowing something so obviously starts spouting bullshit that sound intelligent" way. Except me, of course, I was dying laughing because it was so hilarious and nobody else seemed to know.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 7:37 PM on November 25, 2013 [6 favorites]


I can speak with authority that tween girls currently like bracelets made from tiny rubber bands and iPads.

Also Gmail.
posted by jeoc at 7:51 PM on November 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


I once interviewed this kid who used to work at Intel (this is many years ago). He said that they would occasionally do this ranking plus lay off 10% of everyone thing. The problem is that there were some carefully crafted groups of engineers working on processor design where every single person was critical. Losing 10% of the team would destroy it.

So the crafty managers of these key teams would hire a bunch of college grads during good times. And later, when the corporate 10% layoff policies would be enforced, they'd go to these recent hires and say "I'm sorry, but your work isn't up to the quality of the rest of the team, so we'll have to let you go." These kids often never realized that they were just some pawn being sacrificed in a bureaucratic chess game.
posted by eye of newt at 8:24 PM on November 25, 2013 [8 favorites]


I've seen ranking in action, and it's an insane way to do business. I left the company after I sat through one round of that nonsense as a manager.

I've also seen emails like this. The dot.bubble years...80-90 hour weeks, people sleeping at their desks, coke dealers with access badges, insane fucking mandates from people with glass desks and action figures in their offices. Oh yes, I remember it well...
posted by dejah420 at 10:03 PM on November 25, 2013 [3 favorites]


Not only. It's also become the mail provider for people with AT&T as their ISP, and people who got inherited by AT&T from other ISPs. (Mine used to be bellsouth.net because that was who you got if you wanted DSL in Athens GA.)

For a while there if you showed up at Yahoo mail with scripts blocked it would offer to send you to the palaeolithic interface that didn't depend on javascript. No more. Last time I tried I encountered the "you gotta upgrade and there's no going back" page.

I didn't try. It swears "nothing will be downloaded to your PC" and I'm curious to test that, so I'm preparing software that will take and compare before and after snapshots of my boot drive and tell me about any differences. Cue Ghostbusters theme--There's somethin' new... in the neighborhood... somethin' strange... an' it don't look good...


At worst, it will download some permanent super-cookie for tracking purposes that's hard to get rid of, but most likely it will only use standard cookies (Which aren't hindered by a Javascript block anyway). It will not try to install any programs on your PC without your knowledge or anything. And the cookie can easily be avoided simply by using Incognito mode in your browser.
posted by ymgve at 4:01 AM on November 26, 2013


I find searching much quicker in Gmail than it ever was in Outlook. Everything is indexed by Google, and it works incredibly well for me. And I used to run doozies of searches in Outlook - searching across multiple PSTs etc.

Well to be fair I never specified above what mail client I was using, but on my own computer? It ain't Outlook. And I'm on a Mac so Spotlight indexes all my mail. But 99% of the time I use the search functions in my mail client. The search tools in Thunderbird have become lifesavers to me. I use a set of filters to sort incoming mail into folders just to make sure I don't miss anything important, but after a month or so it all goes into the Gmail archives folder. I used to keep old mail sorted into folders by year and etc. - no more. Tb search lets me very rapidly narrow down until I find what I am looking for. Search for X. Check off boxes - must be to me, must include persons Y and Z, must (or must not) include an attachment, click timeline to narrow down by range, click again to see a list of matches in threaded conversation view... All in tabs, so whatever I was seeing in the main mail window is left alone.

Plus the per-folder retention settings are great... Just having all political email or vendor-related spams get dumped into a folder that automatically kills anything older than X days keeps the volume of junk I deal with manageable.

That, and my mail client pulls in mail for nearly every account I need to deal with, in one spot, so I don't have to dick around with multiple sign-in in the browser, or be forced to log out and back in again constantly to send from different accounts, or resort to having multiple browsers open just to avoid that mess.

I can totally understand corporate asking employees to use the company servers for email. I get that. I have a colleague who uses a Gmail account instead of the standard university email, and I think it's silly - I wouldn't go so far as to say unprofessional, but if you work for institution X you should represent yourself as such, right? But forcing people to use a specific client, or worse, a specific webmail client? That's idiotic*. Email is supposed to be platform agnostic. You should be able to check your damn email with a command line client, for gods sake. Forcing people to use a specific program/client is forcing them to use a workflow that may not even be productive for the individual. Yes, that's the point of dogfooding. Make people use it to make it work better. But do none of the people using Yahoo mail access it with an IMAP client? Shouldn't someone be dogfooding that as well?

*I can possibly exempt institutions where data security is an issue - it's easier to force encryption on a single client than try to keep instructions for all - but still, in most use cases, it's dumb. If you want me to produce my best work, let me work the way I work best.
posted by caution live frogs at 5:22 AM on November 26, 2013 [3 favorites]


I have a colleague who uses a Gmail account instead of the standard university email, and I think it's silly - I wouldn't go so far as to say unprofessional, but if you work for institution X you should represent yourself as such, right?

I don't use my company's corporate email. Their web client gets broken every time they upgrade the system and only holds mail for 60 days. I have to access my email from at least ten different computers depending on where I'm working from. With the Yahoo account I can get to every email I have ever received from any computer in the world. It just works much better.
posted by localroger at 5:31 AM on November 26, 2013


At this point in your life, Outlook may be familiar, which we can often confuse with productive or well designed.

Yeah, I have a huge long list of gripes about Outlook. It's still better than the new Yahoo mail.
posted by jeather at 7:31 AM on November 26, 2013


localroger, I'm surprised you're allowed to do that, for lots of reasons.

Modern Outlook isn't nearly as awful as it used to be. I actually prefer it for some tasks, partly because it has a nice configurable "quick action" feature that allows me to archive mails with a single click. That's nice. (I use a plug-in in Mail.app to mimic the feature, but it requires a keystroke, not a click; for some reason this feature isn't present in Mac Outlook.)

That said, I also access my corporate Exchange mail with Mail.app, and it works well. The connection, I mean. Mail.app as a client reminds me of the quote that I think was from Churchill, about democracy: the worst option, except for all the others.
posted by uberchet at 9:18 AM on November 26, 2013


I've also seen emails like this. The dot.bubble years...80-90 hour weeks, people sleeping at their desks, coke dealers with access badges, insane fucking mandates from people with glass desks and action figures in their offices. Oh yes, I remember it well...


Worst updated version of "Howl" ever.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 9:25 AM on November 26, 2013 [2 favorites]


Y'all don't know anything about shitty email interfaces until you've been forced to use Comcast, er, excuse me, XFINITY Connect.

My favorite feature is the way it regularly logs you out, not for inactivity but on some kind of a login timer or something, right in the middle of composing an email. Boom: "are you sure you want to be redirected away from this page?" And no, it won't be in drafts when you get back.

I could suck it into a client but I LIKE web-based email, since I'm on many different computers throughout the day. I could give up Comcast but I have the perfect email address there and have had it for over a decade. My Gmail address, in contrast, is horrible, and I hate the Gmail interface almost as much as Comcast's.

You know what I do like? Outlook. I even like the new Outlook Web Access.

But the real answer is "I guess I just don't care very much about email clients and interfaces." If everybody had to suddenly go back to pine I'd be cool with that.
posted by Fnarf at 3:04 PM on November 26, 2013


I've been using Eudora for such a very long time. I do so want something better to come along. I can not survive the switch to Gmail; I'm stuck in a mental model that requires folders. I'll leave as soon as I find something better (or when it becomes even more obsoleted than it already is now)
posted by stevil at 4:17 PM on November 26, 2013


I've been using Eudora for such a very long time. I do so want something better to come along. I can not survive the switch to Gmail; I'm stuck in a mental model that requires folders. I'll leave as soon as I find something better (or when it becomes even more obsoleted than it already is now)

What about Thunderbird? That's what I switched to after Eudora.
posted by ymgve at 12:31 AM on November 27, 2013


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