I’ve been using Yahoo’s Y! Go! on my Q for a while now, and, after literally months waiting for its availability, I am once again extremely disappointed in Yahoo. I use Yahoo for mail and their Web app really is pretty good, although not terribly reliable; outages and slow performance are common. This is a company that has such good ideas that are, unfortunately, always hamstrung by poor execution. What’s wrong at Yahoo? Why does code this bad make it out of the lab? To the first question, one would need to answer a lot. And to the second, insert truly puzzled look here.
Go!, now in release 2.0, has such promise, but just isn’t ready for prime time. A few examples – well, to start it really is s-l-o-w. Very. Painfully. Yahoo doesn’t seem to get it about mobility. We are, after all, on the go. Time is of the essence. Waiting for messages to “load” is unacceptable. This isn’t a difficult concept, is it? If a message can’t load, Go! might time out, in which case you’re thrown out of mail and back to the top level of the app. Customization options are basically nonexistent. You can’t set a return address for mail, for example. After composing a message, an error might throw you back to the top level of the app, losing all that typing you did. Completely, totally, acceptable. Who writes this code? What kind of management team would allow it out of the lab?
On the plus side, the interface is simple and intuitive. Almost. Attachments are handled much better than in the regular Yahoo Mobile mail app, and often display quite well. And I like the fact that integration with my e-mail, calendar, and etc. is complete. I don’t worry about synchronization. And in theory I can use any device to get to my data. On the other hand, marking a message as spam, or especially when moving a message to a directory, shouldn’t require a confirmation dialog box, but Go!’s designers apparently think they do. More wasted time.
Oh, wait, sorry, hang on, I apologize. I neglected to mention that the current version of Y! Go! is in fact a beta. Oh, OK, that explains it. Mea culpa. But wait a sec – beta code, at least using the traditional meaning of the term, involves a release candidate that is finished in terms of functionality but might have bugs, and needs a little outside testing in a controlled environment. Beta does not, however, mean proof-of-concept, incomplete, missing features, or otherwise poor. I’ve notice that Yahoo likes to keep code in beta literally for years, perhaps so as to avoid criticism like that in this note and certainly the legal liability associated with shipping crap.
Yahoo’s challenges don’t end there. Service outages are common, and Yahoo’s customer support is perhaps the worst, really, the absolute worst, that I’ve ever encountered. Please keep in mind that I’m a customer – I’m paying them for the alleged service they offer – and I still get treated poorly. A recent e-mail outage was so outrageous (and so outrageously stupid with two o’s and a capital R) that I’m literally too angry to write about it. I’d move elsewhere, but – you guessed it – there’s no way to move the 40K+ e-mail messages I have stored on Yahoo today. The download-to-a-zip-archive feature has been removed. No matter; it almost never worked when it existed.
I could go on, but what’s the point? Yahoo, I truly believe, could fix their problems if they really wanted to. As things stand today, though, I have little confidence in this company, and, as noted above, I’d take my business elsewhere if I could. They are not the people to bet your mobile strategy on. Being locked in, though, I’ll be staying tuned for the next release of Yahoo Go! There’s always hope. I understand that and four bucks gets you a latte at Starbucks. I guess I should mention, however, that I prefer Peet’s.
