Monthly Archives: December 2007

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So I’m a very loyal Chase Bank customer, and I have been for over 15 years. I like them 1000x better then the west coast banks like BofA and Wells Fargo that charge fees to me where they bear no / very little cost. Don’t get me started about how BoFA charges me $3/transaction for using my ATM card – on top of what the ATM provider charges – in towns where there are no BofA ATMs. Paying $6 to take $60 out of my account is robbery. But I digress.

I got a notice in the mail from Chase saying (emphasis mine):

We are changing the way we manage our customer’s preferences…This change allows you more options to specify which mail offers you do not want to receive.

Now I’ve spoken my share of corporate-speak over the years, but it took me a minute to even understand this sentence. My first reaction: “thanks Chase! I really wanted more ways to tell you NO”. ;) I’m surprised that they didn’t add on “our consumer research has told us that you like checking more boxes”.

But then came the real evil sentence (next to 9 checkboxes and a signature field):

unless you tell us otherwise, you may begin to receive offers in the mail about these products and services

So chase managed to take my “NO, nothing in the mail please”, and turned it into 9 separate yeses. I guess no really means yes if you work at a bank. This is exactly how companies get the bad reputations that they do. And now with most banks becoming megabanks, they can get away with it. Sad, really.

I’ll file this away in the “if you ever catch me wanting to do this, slap me” category.

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After almost 10 years leading product teams at Yahoo, I’m moving on. I’ve been thinking for a while that I wanted to take some time off and press the “reset button” on my brain, but it has been a grueling coming to a final decision. And its complicated by the fact that I really love my job and the people I work with.

Looking back over the last 10 years, I am proud of the measurable impact I’ve made on Yahoo! I’m proud of the many years I was known as the My Yahoo! guy, bringing you the features you love and growing Yahoo’s audience significantly. I’m proud of my work with RSS at Yahoo, bringing openness to My Yahoo and many other products–including an RSS ad product. I’m proud of my time as GM of Yahoo! Search when I pitched the idea and launched sponsored search and helped move Yahoo from directory search to web search model. And I helped make a few acquisitions along the way). And I’m proud of leading an innovation incubator (Advanced Products @ Yahoo!) and launching a number of interesting projects. But most of all, I’m proud of the teams I’ve built and the people I’ve hired – to this day it is Yahoo’s people that make this place great.

If you’ll bear with with me in the coming days, I’ll post some of my favorite stories of those years and give you a little inside view of my proudest moments at Yahoo and the biggest mistakes I made along the way. And in general, I hope to blog a lot more, covering product management, the industry and people management. If you aren’t already a subscriber to this blog, grab the feed.

My next step is to take some time off to catch my breath and travel a bit. Then, I’ll be off on my next adventure.

It is always tough to leave a job when you are having so much fun and working with great people. Then again, that’s probably the best time to leave. I know that I’m leaving behind a strong, talented team. My team’s major projects are going well and two will launch early in 2008. And two people whom I admire and enjoy working with are keeping the torch burning. Chad Dickerson will be leading Advanced Products and Salim Ismail (my partner in crime over last few months) will continue to lead the Brickhouse program.

All of which made it possible for me to leave with ease, and I’m thankful for that. I’m not going too far, I’m still a fan of Yahoo. I’ll help in any way I can with my teammates’ upcoming launches, I can’t wait to tell people about them.

So thank you to all the people that I’ve gotten to meet and to work alongside, you made my decade. Wish me luck as I start the next one…

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One of my favorite features of Yahoo! Mail is that little hover that shows a map when you mouseover an address. There are bunch of those actions and in most cases they make Mail more useful.

Now there’s a way to add those things to your blog. The new Yahoo! Shortcuts plugin for wordpress helps you insert those things. I’m not sure how often I’ll use them, but I installed the plugin to see.

Off the bat, I’m not in love with the Yahoo! Search ones (don’t seem to add much value – a link to search?) and I’m not sure why I’d link to Yahoo Shopping when there’s no revshare program in place. I like the flickr integration, you can very easily add pictures. It’s slick.

On the negative side, it’s a beta, and buggy – I can’t remove ones from this post that I don’t like without editing the HTML – I’ll report that to the team. Also, I’d love a way to say “I never want Search Links”. Looking to the future, I’d love it if this opened up, so amazon could write a plugin to replace Y! Shopping.

If you use WordPress, check it out.

UPDATE: I neglected to say that I think this is all pretty cool and nice for a first cut. I’m excited about where this can go. And BTW, I saw a demo yesterday of something in a similar vein and I can only hope Yahoo keeps building these add-ons that make our blogging life easier.

And now here is a list of things hoping to trigger the shortcuts:

  • Yahoo! Inc – YHOO
  • 500 3rd St., San Francisco, CA
  • Nikon D-80
  • Please buy this for me: 2008 Mercedes-Benz SL-Class SL55 AMG Roadster
  • Barack Obama

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I’ve been delinquent in blogging about the new Next* blog (at next.yahoo.com). It’s a place to launch new interesting yahoo projects that aren’t big enough or “official” enough to get a press release or a corporate blog mention. It’s also a place for things that would otherwise fall through the cracks (not quite a fit in any existing business unit). But my favorite is that the idea is to have a place where various Yahoos have a voice, be it controversial, grumbly, or whatever.

Reading it for the last few weeks shows that they are still trying to find that voice, but I know they aren’t looking to build a corporate mouthpiece. The first sign of that attitude was the pre-launch splash screen, which made no sense, but made me laugh:

I’m psyched to see my team posting on Next*, today is a post from Ayman about Zync, give it a read.

Props to Havi, JR, Ernie, and from my team: Keith and Matt (for the design). They were even nice enough to stoke my ego by mentioning my name in the footer.

Subscribe to Next* – Feed – +Add to My Yahoo!