I recently noticed that I wasn't being forwarded emails from my Yahoo! mail account. Looking into this, I noticed the following email from Yahoo!, which I believe illustrates the difference in strategy between them and Goog...
Notice: Yahoo! Mail Plus Account Cancelled
Dear XXX,
Recently we attempted again to renew your Yahoo! Mail Plus service, but we were still unable to do so due to invalid billing information. Regrettably, therefore, we have cancelled your service. You will experience the following service changes:
We value your business and are sorry to see you go. If you did not wish to cancel your account, please visit the Yahoo! Mail Plus ordering page to re-subscribe to Yahoo! Mail Plus.
- Your storage allotment has been reduced to 250 MB. If you were over this quota at cancellation, all new incoming messages will be returned to the sender until you reduce the size of your account. Existing email will not be automatically deleted.
- Your message size has been reduced to 10MB. You cannot send or receive messages that exceed this limit.
- You cannot use a POP3 email client (Outlook, Eudora, etc.) to access and manage your Yahoo! Mail.
- You cannot forward your Yahoo! Mail automatically to another email account.
- You can no longer use some of the advanced protection features including: AddressGuard™, email attachment virus cleaning, and SpamGuard Plus.
- The number of blocked addresses you are allowed has been reduced from 200 to 100. Blocked addresses in excess of this limit have been deleted.
- The number of filters on your account has been reduced from 50 to 15. Filters in excess of this limit have been deleted.
- Your Yahoo! Mail pages contain graphical ads.
- Your outgoing email messages include promotional taglines.
Sincerely,
Yahoo! Mail Customer Care
mail-billing@cc.yahoo-inc.com
What are they thinking here? Of course, on the face of it, they're thinking rationally as a business, a business that needs to make money... But is that really how Yahoo! should be making money? I.e. - charging for something that is, in essence a commodity (storage)? And to make things worse, it's a commodity that is NOT an option anymore with alternatives like gmail and the exploding size of emails, attachments, etc.
What does this do? Well...
First of all, it gets me pretty damned p#!!!! at Yahoo! I've been using their email and IM for over 5 years now. I've been paying for the premium service because at the time, there was no alternative to getting email storage greater than a few MBs AND I wanted to be able to automatically forward email to my corporate email address...
Having moved around during the dot com craze and due to the inconvenience of having to re-acquaint myself with various online sources and subscriptions, I've ALWAYS used my Yahoo! email address as the primary email for subscriptions, online correspondence, etc. It was, in fact, my defacto online and personal contact database... Even after getting a GMAIL account, I did not switch over due to my lazy nature - didn't want to go through the trouble of re-subscribing to online sources and setting up contact info again.
In essence, due to pure circumstance, Yahoo! had become my personal contact and information database with VERY HIGH switching costs... AND I would venture to guess that there are a LOT of people that can relate to this. However, it always irked me that they were charging me for services that I could get for FREE from their main competitor - GMAIL. Again, I kept using yhoo because I was lazy - the account had been set-up to take money from my credit card automatically on a monthly basis. BUT, it was always a sense of irritation, making me feel like yhoo was taking advantage of me...
Although I don't exactly know what happened to get the billing information incorrect, this particular experience finally made me realize that the afore-mentioned switching cost of using an alternative email provider as my primary personal contact and information dbase has just been over-taken by the irritation factor of yhoo's nickel & diming approach. It basically ignited and re-inforced my latent contempt for how they were treating me...
So, I am officially switching. AND Yhoo can kiss my you-know-what regarding any future services. Yhoo doesn't seem to realize that they can't nickel & dime their customers (reminds me of efforts at providing summaries for free and then trying to get people to pay for it to actually get access to useful information - it never works on a large scale because people just get annoyed with these types of tease, bait & switch, techniques), especially when it comes to something that is simultaneously a commodity (i.e. you can get it for free elsewhere) AND a necessity (can't live without it) like email. The real value is not in squeezing another $ from their customers for non-differentiated services / features. Rather, the real value is having a large, captive, traffic-base that can be monetized in a variety of innovative ways. Take a cue from Goog...
So, in summary, yhoo has managed to alienate me - they've just lost their established right to be my personal information and contact dbase. Was that worth it? How much value do you want to place on that? Once again, yhoo has more relative value to those entities wanting to take advantage of the captive customer base, not vice-versa. Concentrate on the customer experience first. Don't charge for things that provide no value differentiation from other Tom, Dick, and Harrys... It won't work. At this rate, yhoo is driving people like myself to goog - now there's a plan...
If yhoo is smart, they should realize that there are similar, real repercussions regarding their strategy / tactics related to being more content-centric...
Let's see if they blow that one too...
dear yahoo, there is a problem. you have billed my account $20.00 and i have NO IDEA why! would you please check on this for me.thanks jim and joanne smith
Posted by: james/joanne smith | October 11, 2005 at 03:25 PM