September 06, 2008- 11 minutes to load?

By mere coincidence, I clicked on the Yahoo toolbar icon for this page at exactly 8:00 AM this morning. I got three error pages, saying the server unavailable try again later, and finally navigated to the 360 Product blog, and then clicked My Page and got here, after the page loading icon spun around on Firefox 3 for what seemed like forever...I actually left the room, walked down the hall to the kitchen, poured a cup of coffee, walked back (a round trip of 60 feet) and it was still loading...I opened another tab, and loaded MSN in 3 seconds, and launched another tab to load igoogle in 1 sec. When I returned to Yahoo tab....it was still loading.
This would be intolerable in a commercial organization, to have your profit making application take so long to load that potential customers simply left, to look for another vendor.
But Yahoo 360 is a for profit site...ads on the page generate revenue for Yahoo!, and the more users of 360, the more revenue...so Yahoo's decision to crap on the user community seems to have been not well conceived. As a friend of mine (who is also her company network administrator) "I used to like 360, but now its like a big steaming pile of crap!"
People like her and I make decisions about networking tools, and lately both organizations have discussed using IM tools to enhance communications and collaboration quicker than using email...and we both are skeptical about Yahoo. Why? Because if they can launch a product that is widely hailed as the best in class (which 360 was), and then turn around and dump it, why would I recommend using anything they came up with?? Why would I put a lot of resources into deployment of a tool from a vendor(Yahoo) that has a reputation for making such poor decisions???
Honestly, both organizations are looking at Microsoft Messenger, which has been around for years, and constantly improved, and Google Talk.

While mentioning Google, check out Google's new browser, Chrome. Its a very low resources user on you computer, I think its Java based. I tried it out the other day, and will probably use it once they add a few more features. I really like the incognito browser feature, which masks your browsing trail, and deletes browse history when closed. While they say its so you can shop for gifts and then not have to worry about the other party accidentally finding what you looked at, I personally think there are other reasons people will like that feature, like looking at porn on the home computer and being somewhat more confident that the kids wont accidentally find the page daddy was looking at. Or that Big Brother wont download your browse history and see you were looking at How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (Which is a very good album by U2 by the way).