Yahoo Mail and Dogfooding

Sam Biddle has a company-wide email from Yahoo executives encouraging all employees to use Yahoo Mail for their work email (currently only 25 percent do). Biddle writes:

Somehow, I have a feeling Google doesn’t have to resort to these tactics to get people to use Gmail.

Or Apple with Apple Mail. The onus is on the Yahoo Mail team to make a product Yahoo employees want to use, not on Yahoo employees to use a turd webmail product and somehow magically improve it through collective complaints. If your employees are only using your own products or services because they have to, or feel obligated to out of some sort of loyalty, you’re losing.

Think back to those stories about Bill Gates’s and Steve Ballmer’s kids not being allowed to own iPods. The problem wasn’t with their kids. The problem was with the Zunes or the even worse “Plays For Sure” era Windows Media devices. If those devices were actually any good, their kids wouldn’t have asked for iPods, and they wouldn’t have had to make any silly rules. I somehow doubt Phil Schiller’s kids are forbidden from buying Samsung phones or tablets.

★ Monday, 25 November 2013