Techie’s personal view: Yahoo sucks
By Techgirl

By any standards, the Indian media are free and fearless.  Tehelka will always be remembered for its brilliant sting operation exposing corruption in Indian defence deals.  More recently, a sting operation showed Governor Tiwari of Andhra Pradesh consorting with call girls.  It seems that Indian techie blogs are inspired by such freedom of expression.

The Microsoft Yahoo partnership was one of the biggest deals of 2009.  The Search and Advertising Services agreement between the two tech giants was only finalized in Dec, 2009.  Under the 10 year agreement, Microsoft’s Bing will be the search engine on all Yahoo sites. Yahoo would provide the relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Microsoft would look after Self-serve advertisements for both companies. Finally, Microsoft would compensate Yahoo through a revenue sharing agreement on traffic generated on Yahoo’s network.

The new Microsoft Yahoo partnership is one of the key forces that will shape the American and Indian internet landscape as Yahoo is big in both these countries.

Hyderabad-based Siddhartha Prakash who works for Microsoft India also blogs as Sidcrazy.  While Siddhartha’s profile mentions his current employer Microsoft India, he makes it amply clear on his blog that his writings reflect his personal views.  

Siddhartha Prakash has just done a blog post titled ‘Why Yahoo Sucks - Remember asl plz era??’ which is disarmingly honest. The main points of his blog post are

“
Here I will try to give comparative details on what things in yahoo piss me off as a naive user of e-mail:
- Very frequent change in the website/UI
- Failing to copy gmail in integrating yahoo messenger to yahoo mail.
- When I log-in into gmail, I can see all my mails. All which are visible on the front page. One window. When I login into yahoo mail, probably people at yahoo think that I have logged in to see their silly ads
- Too poor Spam Filter:
- Tough to get yahoo Messenger working on windows Vista:
“

At the end of his critical analysis of Yahoo, Siddhartha again makes it a point to mention that the ‘views are personal’. Do read his entire blog post to understand why Yahoo sucks for Siddhartha.

Nice to see Indian tech bloggers reporting their ‘personal’ views so freely and fearlessly confident that both Microsoft India and Yahoo India will respect the separation of work and personal views. Not many American bloggers would do the same.

(Thanks to Ramesh for sending in this story tip)

Techgoss note:  Techgirl is a senior Tech journalist who reports on the IT, KPO and KPO Sectors for a leading media house.  In her spare time, she dabbles in satire in her blog http://techgirltalk.blogspot.com