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Spent a few minutes revising my profile at Yahoo because change is good. I went to upload a few new photos, and the photo upload feature was b0rked. Missing preview page, unable to upload multiple photos simultaneously and now all of a sudden in Firefox the upload link mysteriously stopped working. Nice.
Next, I tried to record a new audio greeting. The media player either doesn’t like my Mac or my browser. Then I find out I have to phone in my greeting. I guess that’s ok, but still, how difficult is it to stick a little Flash-based audio recorder?
Finally, I wrote a short script for my video. When I went to record it, Yahoo tells me that video recording is for Windows users only. After I spent 15 minutes on my script.
I bitch about Yahoo messenger all the time. It’s the best one out there and I absolutely love Avatars, but the Mac-hating at Yahoo has got to stop.
Technorati Tags: video, yahoo personals
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
It’s not about hate, it’s about cost/benefit ratio, which is a whole lot better when one is developing for 96 percent of the market than for four percent of the market.
Way it is, guy …
The web is based on standards - Apple, Sun, etc al know this.
Microsoft knows this and is happier inventing new, less functional standards in order to centralize control firmly with them and them alone. They’ve done this for years and will continue to do so…. for them it’s worked and will keep working, until the savvy level of the average computer user rises and they start noticing this. This is already happening - witness the rise of the Mac marketshare, as well as the rise of Linux.
That said, most modern web technologies, AJAX, Flash, etc all work perfectly on a Mac and more often than not, working on a Mac is just matter of testing. Most Safari users have long known that, if you enable the debug menu, you can cause Safari to mascarade as Internet Explorer and gain access to most “Windows only” web sites - the sites work perfect, but the site operators were just too lazy/cheap to test it.
With most major pundits seeing the potential for mid-term rise in Mac market share to as high as 10%, not supporting the Macintosh will start to become more and more costly - ignoring 60 million users is obviously a very bad business decision.
w00t and such!
Sure it is. All one needs to do is to look at it objectively.
People buy computers to run applications. If you’re an applications developer, it is a more efficient use of time/effort/money to develop first for the platform that holds 96 percent of the market, saving development time/effort/money until sometime later, if ever, for work on for the platform that holds four percent of the market.
So the folks at Yahoo set out to develop an application. How do they cost-effectively use their time/effort/ money, developing for the 96 percent, or for the four percent?
Why do you think that Apple has gone to Intel CPUs? To make it easier for developers to port their applications, thus making more applications available for the Mac, thus having more opportunity to sell computers to people who want to run those applications.
It’s all about cost/benefit ratio, guy. As Don Cherry would say, it’s not rocket surgery.
My point is we’re talking about a multi-billion dollar company and a chat application. How difficult is it keep a chat app in parallel development? We’re not talking about Photoshop here.
For sure, new apps will be much easier to cross-compile. It’s amazing that Apple has been doing parallel cross-platform builds of OSX ever since day one.
Apple didn’t just go to Intel CPU’s to make it easier to port apps, that was a major rerason, but the real problem was the lack of a viable, competitive product path with the IBM processors. which have been laggine behind for quite some time. Plenty of people have blogged about this already.
Then there is no point nit-picking about it.
It is for Yahoo to determine both their costs and the benefits they hope to achieve therefrom. You and I have no standing to tell them how to run their business. We do, however, have all sorts of standing to tell them that we will spend our money elsewhere because of the decisions they have made. Perhaps they will listen; perhaps not. But in the final analysis, it’s their business, and their decision to develop or not develop, just as it is my decision to subscribe or not subscribe.