

Yahoo Changing Its Home Page, Gradually - ashishk
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/business/19ping.html

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dmix
_AOL, for example, set off a user revolt in 2006 when it suddenly transformed
the Netscape.com portal into a “social” news service. By the time AOL reversed
course the next year, the Netscape portal had lost half its audience._

I remember reading that Calacanis was praised for his role in transforming the
site before they switched back. Maybe I'm mistaken (I've always avoided AOL).
But half of their audience? That's a very serious hit.

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gamble
I've been turning to Yahoo more often lately. I've noticed that with more
complicated, technical searches, Yahoo now seems to give more useful results
than Google.

The home page is still annoying, but at least it's avoidable.

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helveticaman
I just realized all it takes for me to switch from google to yahoo permanently
is change the control-k search bar on firefox from G to Y!.

That's one low barrier.

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chops
I can relate to the benefit of slowly transforming highly used software.
Recently, we did a massive upgrade to our forum software (the most used part
of our system), changing the look, some of the feel, and some of the
functionality in one fell swoop, and with the instant change, there was quite
a revolt from the userbase.

Luckily, were able to quickly revert much back to begin incrementally making
the changes to little effect. Had we kept it like that, given the response
from the users, we could have lost some long customers.

It was our mistake for making such a huge change in one massive patch, but
we've learned from that mistake.

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stillmotion
It's like back in the day with eBay and their updates. The users were used to
their yellow-ish background, and the company was looking for change. So while
revamping their design, week by week they would alter the hex value from
yellow to a grey color. Without the users knowing, they dynamically changed
and improved the layout as a whole.

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LPTS
If I were yahoo I'd change it to "Microsoft, Call us. We'll take the 40 some
billion. Please, call us."

