I haven't installed Yahoo! Axis, and I don't like yahoo as a company (especially not after what they did to geocities).
But calling on people to say 'no' to a product for these reasons is a weird move.
If it is crap then say why the product is crap, not that the promotion, the logo or all the other stuff surrounding it are crap. What is wrong with the product?
And if all that is that wrong, by all means, still install it.
See for yourself, evaluate it and say: 'yes, this really is crap', and for these very specific reasons. After all, it's Yahoo, it would be surprising if they suddenly came up with this absolutely great product. But at least install it and evaluate it if you're going to tell people not to use it.
Apropos logos, that red-and-white logo has some interesting associations.
I am talking about people inside Yahoo who do not have the ability to say "No".
The product is heavily informed by the ancillary activity that goes on to support it, including the marketing materials. It's called execution. You need an arbiter at the end of the chain who can say, "This isn't good enough." Otherwise, you run the risk of doing something poorly, which is embarrassing and damages the overall brand.
Yahoo, in particular, should be treating its brand very delicately right now.
I found the ad and the video painful to watch. But I still believe the product should be judged on its merits.
As it is this looks as though you're trying to ride on the media buzz generated by the product launch.
Of course Yahoo needs to work on their processes with respect to product definition and execution. That's the whole reason they're dying in the first place.
The just say "No." appears to be addressed to the readers of your post, and to all of the people at Yahoo! inclusive.
But they already gave the indication that they stand behind their product, after all they launched it. If you're going to make a point why they should have said "No." in the first place then you should stick to specifics about the product. After all, if you've already decided that some of the good stuff from the concept will make it into future browsers you are actually saying it is not all bad. And then maybe you should be specific about those things, both good and bad as well.
That would make it a bit easier to say why people should say "No.". Logos, ads and presentation are not a good reason to say "No." to any product.
I don't think he's denying the merits. You need to interpret closely what he is saying.
The essential premise is to say that the product is flawed, archaic and intrusive. It's based off of a "toolbar" premise that evolving technology has eclipsed years ago.
Then he talks about how the investment in what are also bad promotions, marketing and branding into this effort are all wasted too. They are also wasted in a time where it's incredibly important that Yahoo get itself back together.
He's not saying that the logos are the reasons why it's bad. He's just saying that the logos don't make up for a bad product. Further adding that the investment in logos and promotions for a bad product exponentially deepen the wasted effort into a bad product. Even worse, all of these promotions are bad in and of themselves.
This isn't an either-or (that its bad because of promotions or bad because of product) but an all-encompassing poor effort in execution on Yahoo's part. The concluding question is why the hell didn't anyone stop this.
No, actually these kinds of things are binary. Either you launch with something that isn't good enough, or you launch with something that is good enough. It takes talented people to know when that line is crossed.
My point with this post was to highlight the importance of people within an organization like Yahoo having the ability to veto product launches when the line hasn't been crossed. Hundreds of people were involved with Axis, no doubt, and many of them I am sure experienced the same pain that you did when you watched the ad. This is not about the product, per se. It's about the state of the product right now, and the ability of the designers/engineers to make great stuff.
So make it specific, tell them what to change about the product, especially if you liked certain features. It's really easy to say 'this sucks' but that does not offer an alternative.
And to attack the marketing around the launch is something that shows a lot about yahoo as a company but does not say anything about the product (it could be brilliant, for all I know).
All the really good people left Yahoo! long ago, so that's why there is nobody there with the cojones to say 'No.', or the clout to make it stick.
But in spite of that this product apparently still has some good elements in it and that alone should be cause for surprise. To me that is a positive thing, even if they messed up everything else around it because I had long ago given up on even that being possible.
You know what, Its always that the 'real' people leave a company in crisis 'long ago'.
There have been many examples when the 'unreal' people manage to turn the company around. Chrysler, IBM, Apple have all seen turn around with such people.
How do you know that Yahoo is not full of projects like this and 99% of them are cancelled early? 99% success is pretty good, and letting 1% get some press for a day or so every other year doesn't seem like the worst thing ever.
Oh sorry, the logo is so intrinsically evil that no true Scotsman would ever allow a product with it to be released. Riiight....
Yes, but now that it has launched it is a bit late for that.
This is addressed to the general public, not to people within yahoo, it suggests to me that someone internal should have said 'no' but did not so now we get to say no without any specific reason why.
What a coincidence, another baseless Dustin Curtis blog post making it's way to Hacker News once more. I have nothing personally against Mr Curtis, but this post just topped the "Twitter is watching everything you do" post Dustin published a week ago. Is Dustin just sitting at his computer waiting for people to screw up like Yahoo! so he can publicly vilify them?
Looks like Yahoo! is still the poster child for hate, only second to the PHP language of course. Fair enough Yahoo! Axis is a crappy product and perhaps someone should have said something, it's easier said than done. It takes a lot of failed products to release something good, Google are a prime example of this, look how many failed products they've released people should have internally said no to; Google Answers, Google Wave, Google Notebook, Google Buzz... Just to name a few.
It's a very common thing for an Internet company like Yahoo! knee deep in bureaucracy to release crappy products, and it appears as though it is a very common thing to hate on Yahoo!
I'm really tired of dcurtis' blog. Its objective seems to be to be the first to criticize anything and everything. No insight, no critical thought, just hate.
Yes, this thing is kind of dumb and nobody will use it. But why not relax and let time take its course? By Friday afternoon, everyone will be back to forgetting that there is even a company called Yahoo.
699 million of those users are me. Every time I need to log into Flickr, I end up creating a new account because their password rules are something like "must be a dictionary word and your birthdate" and I can't ever remember it.
But seriously, the remark was mostly tongue-in-cheek. Yahoo has a userbase, but their reputation for innovative in-house products is pretty much zero at this point.
Yes. Until you said that, I forgot I own several Yahoo Groups and belong to a few more. I belong to only one Google Groups email list and only because it used to be run on some other listserve thingy* until it kind of changed ownership. I am not a paying member, thus I was thinking Yahoo was not relevant to me.
I'll agree that the title of this probably should have been "Someone should have spoken up a long time ago."
But aside from that, this post showed me the TOS which I had missed earlier. I can't believe something like that slipped past all the people who worked on this.
Of course, the Axis Powers were Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy. Plus the site name's black and steel lettering has vaguely foreboding, retro-fascist feel. Or maybe it is a Star Wars Imperial vibe. Either way, just saying that is a little unsettling. It isn't a happy brand.
So, you say Apache Axis are secretly fascists? I knew something is wrong with that SOAP thing, just couldn't figure it out... Now I see. Good thing I'm using REST now. There's also a Swedish IT company called Axis Communications, that is very suspicious too. The CEO is probably Emperor Palpatine in disguise.
Not only does the logo look like Adobe's, it also looks suspiciously like AXIS Jiu Jitsu's logo (see http://www.axisjj.com/ -- take the central triangle, rotate it left and mirror it on the y-axis.)
I think what irritates me most about Axis is that they had to slap their obnoxious "Yahoo!" logo on it. It just irks me whenever I see it. The way the text is slinky link makes me think of children's toys.
I just installed Axis add-on to Firefox and my browser instantly slowed to a crawl. I have about 20 tabs open, but still. I removed it and everything is back to top speed again.
But calling on people to say 'no' to a product for these reasons is a weird move.
If it is crap then say why the product is crap, not that the promotion, the logo or all the other stuff surrounding it are crap. What is wrong with the product?
And if all that is that wrong, by all means, still install it.
See for yourself, evaluate it and say: 'yes, this really is crap', and for these very specific reasons. After all, it's Yahoo, it would be surprising if they suddenly came up with this absolutely great product. But at least install it and evaluate it if you're going to tell people not to use it.
Apropos logos, that red-and-white logo has some interesting associations.