The Best Products Are Not Always Obvious

Posted on October 2, 2007 by Bruce Keener

I have been a big user of Google products for the past few years. I would not call myself a Google fanboy, but I considered their products to be innovative and in some cases, such as their search engine, to be the leaders of the pack.

Then yesterday I got my first dose of disillusionment with Gmail: its delivery of mail to my box is many hours late. For example, one email that was delivered to me this morning was sent early yesterday afternoon.

Then last night I was reading an SEOmoz post entitled Yahoo! is the Most Fulfilling Search Engine:

Yahoo stats

This was a huge surprise to me. Yahoo! has been getting a lot of bad press, yet here are some stats that indicate that their search engine technology could be interpreted as the best. Debatable perhaps, but interesting nonetheless.

I have not even considered using Yahoo! for searching in the past few years, but now I am thinking I need to give them a try. Maybe I ought to try out their email system, too.

I have realized that, while I often harp on the value of competition, all too often I settle in some products and stick with them even when the competition is worth checking out. Do you do this, too? Does it really matter? After all, we can’t spend all our time checking out the massive products that are available, can we?

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  • John

    Lifehacker says Yahoo upgraded their search engine just this morning.

  • capo

    I’ve been reading lots of good things about Y! Mail lately. I have an account there but use it only occasionally. Like you, I’ve gotten into the Google habit. But you’re right – competition is a good thing. When companies get big, they seem to also get slow and stupid. Witness Microsoft. They used to be a lot more nimble and at least adapted to the market, if they weren’t outright leading it. I don’t think that description fits them at present. Apple, Google, and various other vendors and open source efforts are beginning to nibble at their lunch. Hopefully it will wake them up and make their products better and more competitive. If not, there’s always another young, nimble, hungry company willing to take the ball and run with it. I wonder what kind of influence Eric Schmidt has has on the big G. I watched him for a while and listened to him speak at several conferences when he was CEO of Novell. I can’t say I was impressed. He seemed to be more of a John Sculley than a Steve Jobs, if you catch my drift.

  • Big Al

    I’ve been using Yahoo mail for many years. I use their Mail Plus service, which I pay $20 a year for. One of the best features of Mail Plus is “disposable addresses”. I create a base email address and then can create new email addresses with a suffix to my base address. For example I create “my_mail@yahoo.com” as my base and then I could create “my_mail-contests@yahoo.com” and use that address for contests (for example). Email is delivered to my inbox with a custom color (which I set) so I can tell it’s from one of my disposable addresses. If I start getting a lot of spam on that address I can simply delete it.

    I don’t know what the free service offers (been too long), but with Mail Plus I have unlimited storage, pop3 etc. I can also have Y! Mail connect to other pop3 email servers and pull mail into Y! Mail.

    I’ve rarely had problems with Y! Mail over that years (in fact I can’t even think of any off hand). It’s worth trying out…

    -al

  • http://www.keenerliving.com/ Bruce

    @Big Al, hey buddy, thanks for stopping by. I appreciate the details on Y! Mail, and especially the data on Mail Plus. I will check it out today.

    @capo, Interesting thoughts on Schmidt. I haven’t followed enough of the bytes on him to have much of an opinion, but you could be on target.

    @John, I’ll review that lifehacker article. Didn’t notice it in my feeds this morning, but my feed reading was pretty early this morn.

  • Thomas R. Hall

    I’ve used Yahoo! for a long time, and their Mail is still great. It doesn’t have the same interface as Gmail, but it has some interesting features (including what Big Al mentions above). The extra $20 to get Mail Plus is worth it, in my opinion, though some of the features you get are free in Google (such as sending from another address).

    If you want to check out a version of Yahoo! search that is very minimalist like Google, go to:

    http://search.yahoo.com/

    They still have great PIM integration in the Mail interface as well. Some of the apps may not look new (such as Calendar), but are very functional. The only problem they have is that their spam filtering is nowhere near as good as Google’s.

  • http://www.keenerliving.com/ Bruce

    After Big Al’s suggestion, I went ahead and signed up for Yahoo! Plus, although I have not really done anything with it.

    Thanks for the Yahoo link, too. I was not aware. I have been too Google-centric in my thinking, and need to be more open to Yahoo and MSN services. I know the latter are playing catch-up in many respects, but they also have some innovations that I have not been taking advantage of.

    And thanks for the PM on email consolidation. You are right that I could benefit from consolidating some addresses.