It has been a few weeks since Mayer blogged about spending all weekend re-creating the Yahoo! logo. I must admit, at the time I didn't like the post but felt that it was all too easy to bash it. I have tried hard not too but can no longer prevent myself from making one point which has been irritating me.
In her post she stated that the aim was to make Yahoo! appear fresh, cool and whimsical. This got me thinking about Yahoo! and what it (as a brand) meant to me. Low and behold, I could not put my finger on it. So I did something that I never do, and probably haven't done in years; I visited their website. This made me none the wiser. It was just a cluttered mash up of advertisements and links for email, games, news, search. This brings me to Yahoo!'s biggest problem (and my beef). I, as a potential customer could not tell you what they do. As such I am unable to find a reason to visit their website. Yahoo! does not know it's arse from it's elbow so to speak. It appears as an organisation which has been caught up in trying to keep it's fingers in so many pies that it has lost all of it's brand and identity. Google does not have this problem. Whatever else Google does, the one thing that sticks out is search. The homepage reflects this, and their other products are arranged around it. This is presumably part of the reason that the company has verb status. Before Yahoo! becomes fresh, cool and whimsical it needs to work out what it is doing and why it is here. Spring cleaning the homepage would be where I'd start.
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