This is what I saw this morning in the Economic Times.
What on EARTH does this man mean when he says, “I want Yahoo! to be ‘Meaningfully Beautiful’??”
Hmmmm… I can’t even roll it off the tongue.
Try saying it – “Be meaningfully beautiful. Be meaningfully beautiful. Be meaningfully beautiful…”
This gentleman goes on to say, “I’m building a culture of design that is rational, emotional and meaningful….”
?????
Please check these screen shots:
IT’S SO ELEGANT!!
Now, when I click on the main image, I am taken to the news section:
and this is the second fold:
I think the Yahoo! site and pages look just fine.
The tweets on the right side were a nice surprise. They added a lot more gravy to the story.
So WHERE is the UGLINESS??
Where is the “MEANING” MISSING??
What is this man going to do to make Yahoo! “Meaningfully Beautiful”????
If the man can’t make me understand what his plans for Y! are, how will he MAKE the change happen?
Why can’t Yahoo! simply get that:
– People like to SEARCH
– People like to NETWORK
– People like to PLAY GAMES/WATCH VIDEOS!!
If Yahoo! gets 700 MILLION UNIQUES EACH MONTH (comScore Jan 2012), why can’t they just offer these things to them???
So, isn’t it time to make Yahoo! MEANINGFULLY RELEVANT – NOT MEANINGFULLY BEAUTIFUL?!
*****
Check out these linked stories:
1. MY MEETING WITH CAROL BARTZ (ex CEO OF YAHOO!)
I met Carol Bartz in a very nice sit down lunch discussion organized by Yahoo! India in Nov 2009
Yeah – like a moron, I used to wear proper shirts and jackets at that time.
Anyway, this is why my first and last meeting with Carol Bartz was ‘shattering’ :
– The FIRST, and I mean FIRST thing Carol Bartz spoke about when she started her speech was about ‘Yahoo E-Mail’ and the NUMBER OF MAILS that Y! sends out everyday!
She labored about the fact that there were zillions of servers that Y! employed and how amazing the entire concept was!!
REALLY?
I was stunned! Was this someone who had never heard of the cloud and what new Internet architecture was becoming?? I mean, what was the big deal about lots of servers and lots of mails??
It was stunning to have heard her berating us with the Y! mail piece as if it were a new technology to land a spaceship on the sun.
– I asked her, “Why Yahoo! has NOT GONE SOCIAL?”
I pointed out that Y! was a massive massive community of real people ‘hanging’ out everyday and it was like a MASSIVE fully loaded Football Field WITH THE LIGHTS OFF.
All that was needed was to TURN the lights ON – via a ‘social connect’ button/bar/anything!
What Carol Bartz responded back was by saying that PHOTOS was the BIG THING that consumers were sharing and they had flickr that was a great service.
I STILL REMEMBER asking her, “Carol – WHY NOT GAMES?” (yeah, it was of course a selfish pitch!) and I did labor that a majority of Y! users are American Women who happen to be the sweet spot for Zynga Games and hence it was a perfect way to get social and sticky….
Carol smiled.
– I complimented her about her new India centric Television, Print and TV campaign.
Carol’s face lit up and she was very happy that I could actually spell out the baseline of the campaign.
Well, I was flattering her for some brownie points but it occurred to me that this was the CEO of one of the largest Internet Companies of the world getting excited about traditional media ads – something most Internet firms think of as avoidable and unproductive.
– Someone asked her about Facebook.
The response was SHOCKING. She said, “Yeah, I know… That’s what they always ask me in San Francisco, New York, London etc. That’s because the people in these cities think that Facebook is the begginning and end of the world. Well, I tell them – GO TO MIDDLE AMERICA – Ask the Housewife there what she thinks of Y! and then you will know.”
That made NO SENSE AT ALL. The Internet was and is a global phenomena. Not local honey that sells in small country farms!!
(ps – those same women now throng facebook and connect with all their friends and relatives and like how)
I came back feeling puzzled. She seemed old, out of context and very confused about what Y! was GREAT ABOUT.
NOTE – Lots of the points above may not be the ad verbatim discussion in that meeting – BUT it captures the essence of my meeting with her. Apologies if there is an exaggeration.
Also, a few people including some comments in this post asked, “Alok – why say this now? When you felt so strongly that time, why didn’t you say so then?” Well:
– I WAS CHICKEN – I didn’t have the courage to think of challenging a 60 year old veteran who had made a big reputation for herself.
– Facebook was still a ‘concept’.
– I was possibly pandering to Y! for business/deals etc. In that pursuit, I even wrote a positive post on this meeting (keeping the bad stuff out ‘coz I wasn’t even sure if it was bad!). Now, I deleted that post today but after an amazing whack on the head by fellow rodinhooder Gajendrasingh Verma who commented below, I decided to re-instate that post, available here. This was one of the most educative moments for me! But, I live and learn!
– I had just read a story about Carol Bartz around the time of this meeting: She had breast cancer and was recovering from Chemotherapy. On her way to work, she had chosen spots along the drive (I think from Sausilito to San Fran city) where she would get out and vomit. She had pre-defined her vomit spots. I was awestruck by someone of this courage and strength.
In any case – I LOVE YAHOO!. ALWAYS DID – ALWAYS WILL.
I also deeply respect Jerry Yang and David Filo and they will remain my superheroes forever.
******
2 – A few months ago, I had written a post on therodinhoods.wpengine.com called ‘The Reality of Ugliness’. The same is reproduced below:
Many people ask me, “Alok, the games2win website looks so ugly. Why don’t you make it better?”
You bet I could/should!
The challenge is that whenever I have tried, my 150,000 odd daily visitors get pissed off.
They are USED to the UGLINESS. They don’t care about it anymore. Instead they come for the games they remember or want to find, then they dive in, spend time gaming, enjoy themselves and exit.
I doubt anyone ever comes to games2win just for the beauty of the site.
Now, is that a good thing?
Absolutely NOT!
I wish I had made a better and more beautiful site in 2006 when we started. Or being more practical, gently improved the site rather than wait for it to reach shit’s creek.
This post is about the Curse of Ugliness – the fact that people quickly adapt to what you serve them and get used to it. Changing for the BETTER then becomes a big challenge.
Consider:
The new Gmail look and feel change. One cannot doubt that IT IS better than the old look.
Google team explains it so sincerely here:
But, I know tons of people who are UP IN ARMS and hate the way Gmail has made reading mail more relaxed, easy to read etc etc.
Just check out sample rants here (source – comments under the new gmail youtube walkthru video)
So, the mother and father of all Internet Companies – Google suffers the same curse as g2w?
Just as one more example:
The home page of amazon.com
And the home page of the Apple Store
– It’s easy to be clumsy about design and look and feel. But that clumsiness becomes a curse FOREVER.
Users get used to navigating bad UI and design as long as they get what they want.
That need may be a game or their mail or just the stuff they were looking for
When you present them a new, improved, ‘better’ look – they REVOLT.
Why?
That’s because the CORE product or service hasn’t changed. It has remained the same. And for the users, there is this NEW complexity to overcome – the complexity of CHANGE.
So unless you are REALLY CHANGING the core offering, don’t mess with the look. Unless you have to.
Trust me, you will be shocked to see falling page views, lesser time spent and lower returning visitors when you make GREAT changes.
Of course, if you are willing to suffer that, then slowly things will get back to normal and POSSIBLY improve.
– When you start with beauty and elegance, then DELIGHT is also what you sell.
Anyone who uses Apple understand this.
The GREATNESS about starting right is that when you IMPROVE something already beautiful – IT DOES GET NOTICED and appreciated.
That’s because it was creating a SATISFACTION to your user in the first place. And when you improve on that satisfaction, then you create even more DELIGHT!
As an example of this, consider the Google Home Page.
Its starkness, its simplicity has been the cornerstone of Internet Elegance.
When Google does commemorate special people’s birthdays, events and even seasons with minor changes to its Logo – it gets immediately noticed and widely appreciated!
– The ecosystem adapts to beauty or ugliness or anything in between.
Nothing exemplifies this better than the difference in the look, and feel of the android and iTunes app markets.
Android is noisy, clumsy and a collaboration of all kinds of designs and sensibilities.
The iTunes App app store is …. well, APPLE.
It’s perfect.
Now, as developers for both markets, its funny but true:
While developing Apps for Apple, we think ‘is it beautiful enough? How will my app stack up against the rest of the beautiful apps in the iTunes store?’
And just thinking of it, we strive to make better looking apps.
When we deliver apps for Android – we are always a bit more casual – a kind of ‘Chalta Hai’ attitude because our neighbouring apps also seem to be of that vein.
To summarize:
– Start with beauty as best you can achieve it. While it may not be your selling point, it will make you memorable and delightful.
– Improve as much as you as you go along
– Change ugliness with caution especially if you have lots of customers; they will prefer the Ugliness to the heartache of CHANGE
*****
Added this addition to this post after publishing THANKS to the one and only Nayana Somaratna who reminded me of Craigslist.
Check out the home page of craigslist.com shown below.
If you have been living under a rock and don’t know what is Craigslist, just search on google.
It’s also the site that DESTROYED the Classifieds business of Newspapers in CALIFORNIA.
Now, I wonder what they think about Beauty vs Ugly?
*****