Wednesday, February 25, 2009

A Little Snark at Yahoo

I keep my spam account at Yahoo Mail. When I went to log in today, I saw this banner...


... it turned out to link to an ad for Yahoo. And the first thing I thought after I clicked it was they had to host this on Google's YouTube. Honestly, what does that say about the company?

In fact, there seem to be a lot of elements that may reflect Yahoo's mindset. I love how they open with what appears to be an Apple II and a reference to the movie "Short Circuit". There is a brief shot of an IBM PC which quickly pivots into a Mac. Next up is the e-mail program Eudora, which (if I remember correctly) also started on the Mac. Not fond of Microsoft, are we?

Then we have NCSA Mosaic, which became Netscape, and was then bought by AOL. But Yahoo had its own browser back in 1999! I guess they forgot about that.

It's not all bad. There is a cool screenshot of "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web", which is what Yahoo was called before it was Yahoo. We also get a glimpse of RocketMail, a competitor to Microsoft's Hotmail that was purchased by Yahoo.

But sadly (and predictably) the ad goes downhill from there. Johnny5 asks some girl to a party he is DJing, to which she responds with "are you asking me out on a date"? (A little desperate, Marie?) Of course they get married and have kids, all the while using Yahoo Mail to communicate and document their lives. Oh, and Johnny becomes a famous DJ.

You can find the ad here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWfWJGSTY94

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