2 posts tagged “incompetence”

Once upon a time, Lucire supplied content to the AltaVista Entertainment Zone, back in the day when AltaVista was the top search engine. Then, for years, Yahoo! News Full Coverage would use Lucire headlines, until its site was rejigged. These days, Google News does a reasonable job of spidering our news coverage, but I noticed at the end of 2007 that Yahoo! News Full Coverage still had a fashion page. I asked if we could recommence our old relationship, on January 2.
   I have had experience dealing with Yahoo! before. Earlier this decade, one of our Yahoo! Groups went missing, even though we never broke any of the terms and conditions. The group shell was still there, just all its messages were deleted. We kept sending questions and all Yahoo!’s personnel could do was copy and paste from FAQs we had already read, none of which were appropriate. It’s why we contacted the support team in the first place—duh!
   It’s sad to know that nothing has changed this decade. And that’s sad. I remember when founders Jerry and David were answering questions personally and when they first listed our sites.
   Here is the dialogue with the salutations, technical details and conclusions omitted. Note that they never answer the question and tell me things that anyone with an IQ around the level of a marijuana-smoking Rastafarian politician might know.

To Yahoo!, January 2, 2008
Years ago, Yahoo! News Full Coverage quite happily linked to us:

http://news.yahoo.com/fc/Entertainment/Fashion_and_Modeling/feature_articles/9

Then one day around 2002 or 2003, it stopped, after a site rejig.
   I want to say that we at Lucire (www.lucire.com) are still churning out articles and op-eds nearly daily, and Yahoo! News would be more than welcome to tap into one of the internet’s longest running fashion news sources.
   How would we best recommence our earlier partnership? …

From Heather at Yahoo!, January 3, 2008
Thank you for writing to Yahoo! News.
   All company press releases and news stories available on Yahoo! originate from other sources. We cannot take individual press releases and add them to our service.
   If you are interested in having your press releases show up on Yahoo!, contact PR Newswire and/or Business Wire. For a fee, either of these services will make sure hundreds of news services are aware of your company announcements.
   Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! News.

   Well, thanks for giving me answers to a question I never asked, Heather. And thanks for telling me stuff I already knew. Did she even read my question? I replied pretty soon afterwards. Maybe, I thought, I made it too hard, even though I had chosen a category for my question that had nothing to do with what Heather told me.
   OK, simplify, Jack. Maybe she was just too busy, maybe the silicone from her fake tits had been eating its way up to her brain, maybe she had had a fight with her boyfriend during the lunch hour.

To Yahoo!, January 3, 2008
That was not my question, though I appreciate you have a selection of stock answers.
  For many years, Yahoo! News Full Coverage linked news articles, not press releases, from our publications. This stopped without explanation about four or five years ago when the site was rejigged.
  I am simply asking for Yahoo! News Full Coverage to recommence linking our stories.

From Derek at Yahoo!, January 4, 2008
Thank you for writing to Yahoo! News.
   We appreciate you contacting Yahoo! News regarding this issue & apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.
   Please be assured that we are aware that the local news module does not always appear.  The information you have provided will be forwarded to our Production team and/or content provider for review.  Any necessary changes will be made as soon as possible.  If we can be of further assistance, please let us know.  We appreciate your patience as we research the issue.

   What? Or, in modern internet parlance, WTF?! Did I mention anything about a ‘local news module’? Derek, are you as illiterate as Heather? Were you too preoccupied after reading a penis enlargement email? Are you going through some withdrawal because the doc took the heroin away?
   Since this sort of BS happened back in 2002 with the Yahoo! Groups service, you can see I was getting impatient.

To Yahoo!, January 5, 2008
Your reply does not address the original issue, either. I know it's easy (and Yahoo! practice) to copy and paste answers from your database (and yes, we know when you do this), but I wouldn't write you if it was already covered in your FAQs.
  Please address the original question. It remains at the end of this email.

   Anything?
   Anything?
   Yahoo! seems to have placed this in the “too hard” pile because it has nothing left to copy and paste from.

To Yahoo!, January 17, 2008
May I please ask after a response to this issue? Please do not copy and paste. As you can see, I have had two stock answers already, neither of which are intelligible given the question.
  The original question is at the end of this email. I would appreciate it if it was read intelligently and answered intelligently. The category is partnering with Yahoo! News, which should at least narrow the topic down for you.

   Nothing.
   Today:

To Yahoo!, January 28, 2008
With respect, may I please get an answer?

   I’ll keep this up. People need to know how lousy Yahoo! gets. And I’ll be happy to dig out the earlier experience with Yahoo! Groups if they push me to.
   What also gets me (beyond the fact that Yahoo! staff are illiterate) is that among the questions is a category you can choose (which I did) called ‘Partnering with Yahoo! News’. This would normally mean that even if these idiots are copying and pasting answers, there must be a set of them relating to the topic. Otherwise, why would the category exist? They seem to be going out of their way in providing answers from another category.
   Last time we just shut the group down and moved all our company groups off Yahoo!. We win, Yahoo! loses.
   So, why are people buying their stock again? With this sort of behaviour, Yahoo! looks like a company heading south fast, pissing off netizens left, right and centre. Eventually it’ll get to another person, then another person, and so on, and so on, and so on. (Thanks to another Heather for that one—Heather Locklear.)
   Well, at least I don’t live in Red China and Yahoo! isn’t passing on my confidential information to the People’s Secret Police there so that the Politburo throws my ass in jail and takes my organs for Communist Party members. I guess I should be happy.

My comment on the Journeyman Blog today:

Mike, you are being generous. I’m no longer going to watch American serials that don’t have self-contained episodes as my “default” position, making exceptions for presently unforeseeable situations. I feel that strongly about Journeyman.
   Journeyman was an exception, but I have managed to stay away from all the other so-called hits with “story arcs” anyway (Lost, Heroes, The Nine, Traveler, Prison Break, 24, etc.).
   Like you, I was a Day Break fan and we managed to get, fortunately, all 13 episodes networked here (albeit at a really sucky time). I gave Journeyman a chance on the strength of a fabulous pilot but now, if I hear ‘Made in USA’ along with ‘story arc’, I just won’t bother.

   This cannot be good for the US TV industry, but if it has morons running the networks, then what can it expect? Journeyman was the last straw, especially as I tracked how the show unfolded and how inept NBC had been. This isn’t the first series that I have followed that was cancelled prematurely—but after so many of these, where American networks cannot understand that loyalty to the network brand also depends on overall product quality, I am just fed up.
   This is the Ford Taurus syndrome. The story is this: the Taurus was a huge hit for Ford. Instead of continual improvement, Ford opted to abandon the Taurus, letting it get trampled by the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord, when the SUV boom happened. Toyota and Honda, instead, kept improving their sedans and developed SUVs. By 2006, the Taurus was a joke, sold to rental car fleets. It was only for the 2007 model year that Ford transferred the Taurus name on to its Five Hundred. By that time, Ford lost a lot of customers to the Japanese and there are people who felt their loyalty had been thrown into their face.
   It also had the Ford Contour in the US, which the company refused to market properly, probably because it had been co-developed with its European branch. The claim was that Americans were not interested in the CD-sized market that the Contour occupied. Reality: Dearborn probably wanted to cover its own butt by saying, ‘We are not taking this European stuff because we have to sell domestically designed.’ It’s perhaps all political. Meanwhile, Americans were buying the same-sized car from BMW and Mercedes. Buyers just kept going foreign.
   Ford’s latest refusal to sell the German-designed C307 Focus, and instead facelift the older model for American buyers, is yet another example. Now the Focus is getting trampled by the Honda Civic, and the next Toyota Corolla will beat it even more. History keeps repeating there at Ford.
   In other words, Ford thinks Americans are dumb Yanks.
   NBC has combined these moves, but really, every network is guilty of this. While Journeyman was not a huge hit, NBC knows its poor scheduling and non-existent promotion are to blame. Instead of allowing an audience to build (the numbers were growing), it decided to interrupt Journeyman’s schedule just as the show found its legs. It had a quality product which it intended to kill. And in the meantime, viewers are feeling that the networks are not listening. They will happily go to cable, DVDs and other services. NBC’s remaining offerings—dumbed-down reality fare—will be like the 2005 Ford Taurus.
   In other words, the US networks think Americans are dumb Yanks. 
   No, foreigners do not think Americans are dumb because of George W. Bush. Foreigners think Americans are dumb because that is how American corporations treat American citizens, by making decisions that disrespect the American consumer’s intelligence. Foreigners then make an erroneous presumption that that is what consumers have asked for—when in fact most Americans are as upset about the strange corporate decisions that take place.
   As television globalizes—and it will—the US networks will be like Ford, where perceived quality and loyalty will no longer be there.
   Bad moves against quality products do affect the overall parent brand—something that even brand consultants need to remember.
   And, sadly, the parent brand’s image can often be tied to the national one.