Yahoo has deteriorated of late

Yahoo has been in the news lately because of the takeover bid from Microsoft. But what I am really concerned about is the fact that Yahoo's services has deteriorated and there has been no attempt to get a lot of the bugs/idiosyncrasies fixed.

I have been using Yahoo email for more than a decade now. Of late, Yahoo has been promoting its "new look" email which emulates an email client program. But all this window dressing doesn't conceal the fact that their basic email feature has a lot of bugs which they haven't bothered to fix in over a year now in spite of repeated requests.

For one, their mail search doesn't work most of the time. At least for me. Even if I type in the name of someone or some subject that occurs in several recent messages in my inbox, the search may return "no matches", or a dozen, or over a hundred depending on its mood. Many times, it would just return an error message saying that there is a problem with accessing my messages, and would ask me to try later.

This has been happening for more than a year now and is really pissing me off. I had complained long ago to Yahoo, and then they did get back to me and said they would fix it which they did. But the problem started again within a month. Subsequent requests to fix it have not elicited any responses. I then wanted to find out if this problem is unique to my account. A friend of mine here in India has also come across the same problem.

Also if I go to their advanced search option and ask to list messages that are older than, even say, 3 months, it would find no matches! This despite the fact that I have messages going all the way back to 2002 in my inbox!

Another thing I find with Yahoo mail is that, I cannot even seem to add the sender's address of many of my incoming emails to my address book! For some weird reason, the link to add the sender's address doesn't appear with some email ids in a random fashion. (And no, this is not because I have already added them.) So many a time, I end up having to manually add the address to the book by cutting and pasting it from the email message.

The above major problems (and several minor ones) are present in their new email interface also. The new email interface lacks the advanced mail search feature which is still there in the classic interface. But this is not a big loss since it doesn't seem to work anyway..

The yahoo email id I use was created when I was in the US, and is still based out of a US server. I have another id which I created as an Indian resident, and the news items which appear on the email home page (now Yahoo India) are outdated by several months.

For example, I see the following entertainment stories displayed on the main email page today (June 28)-
"Witherspoon backs bracelet sales for UN women fund" dated March 5
"Anna Nicole Smith daughter Dannielynn named heir" dated March 5
and a few others, just as old.

I am wondering what the Yahoo India team is doing. Are they even aware of this issue? Are they just plain lazy to get it fixed?

Also Yahoo is famous for making announcements promising that they would offer some new feature in the near future, but would conveniently forget about it. For example, they sent emails some three or four years ago saying they would offer a Yahoo India dating website soon. It never materialized.

Also when they removed the feature to post messages under news items more than a year ago , they had a blurb saying that they would come up with a new messaging board service which would be much better. It's been more than a year now, and one doesn't hear about that anymore. Only God knows whether they have scrapped that plan for good.

These, and a lot of other irritants, have destroyed Yahoo's credibility completely in my view. I plan on switching over to Google (as many have already done). I hope Google's overall level of service is much better. Yahoo's complacence is going to cost it dearly, I'm afraid. Whoever bids for Yahoo is bidding for a rusted and sinking ship.

Does the average consumer make rational engineering choices?

I am not sure if I am the only one bugged by the common sight these days - in many public areas and showrooms with wide-screen display TVs, often the standard TV format of 4:3 is stretched to fit the entire wide screen (with aspect ratio of 16:9). The fact that this results in an unnatural picture, where faces appear bloated and perfectly spherical objects like basketballs appear ovals don't seem to bother anyone. There is an even more hideous form of stretching available in some TV sets called "panoramic widescreen mode" where the center of the picture is minimally stretched while the edges are grossly stretched. This ensures that even straight lines at an angle to the screen appear crooked. When this used to happen in old CRT TVs in the past, we would identify it as a problem and get it repaired. Now this kind of bug is no longer considered a bug, but a "feature".

It seems that the average consumer thinks a bigger picture which fills the whole screen is more important than, or compensates for, the gross distortion that this causes.

With this kind of mass consumer logic, is it any surprising that those with saner minds have to deal with consumer products that are downright mediocre or even defy common sense?

Introduction

Okay, now that you have landed upon this blog, let me give a you a brief introduction to myself as well as the unusually titled blog and why I created it.

I have been in the electronics industry for well over a decade, and have spent the better part of it in Silicon Valley. Currently I am in Bangalore.

The reason for creating this blog is because, as a passionate technologist, I am disillusioned by the current state of affairs in the hi-tech industry. It seems that the industry as a whole is guilty of promoting technologies that are inefficient, defy common sense, take consumers for a ride, environmentally unfriendly, unethical, or several of the above.

The term "Junk Engineering" is borrowed from its relatively better known sibling "Junk Science", and is not my original creation anyway. As most of you might already be knowing, junk science refers to stuff that passes for science without really being scientific. The "scientists" who perpetrate pseudo-scientific nonsense are highly unethical and everyone would agree with that.

But in the case of junk engineering, it isn't so cut and dried. Perfectly respectable engineers and managers in highly respected organizations are a party to junk engineering, without them even realizing it. Most of the times, there is no active effort to curb inefficiencies, mediocrity, or even plain unethical behavior because of several factors, not the least of which are just complacence and general human reluctance to disrupt the status quo.

Also, since companies are, first and foremost, profit-motivated entities, many a time, these negative factors are actually encouraged in an insidious manner if there is more money to be made from adopting such a strategy. In such instances, one cannot blame specific individuals easily, which makes it all the more easier to get away with them.

It is not just the companies, but also the consumers who are to be blamed for this sorry state of affairs. For if consumers don't force a change which is in the best interests of them first, the companies never will.

I want to do my best to bring these issues to everyone's attention. With the current state of technology, companies can deliver a lot better than what they are currently doing. All it requires is a change in mindset (of management). This would never happen till it is forced upon them by consumers like you and me.

I am myself a futurist. I see that technology can do a lot to improve the quality of life of many people (both in the developing and developed worlds). But I see that mega corporations are stumbling blocks along the way. They either don't have their priorities straight or have vested interests.

Ok, I think you get the drift of what this blog is about. But this is not going to be another Ralph Nader "evil corporate" rant. Instead, being an engineer myself, I want to focus on very specific issues, one at a time. In many cases, I will show that there are simple solutions to common problems. But these are the issues that are commonly overlooked for the various reasons given above.

Also most of my posts will concern the hi-tech hardware/software/consumer electronics industry since these are what I'm most familiar with.

If the concerned companies listen and try to improve the state of affairs, I consider the purpose of this blog as being served.

I also encourage feedback from average consumers like you.

More to come..