In a bewildering internal Yahoo memo that has been leaked to AllThingsD, two company executives explained why employees should cease and desist from using Microsoft Outlook in favor of Yahoo Mail. The executives said, "Earlier this year we asked you to move to Yahoo Mail for your corporate email account. 25% of you made the switch (thank you). But even if we used the most generous of grading curves (say, the one from organic chemistry), we have clearly failed in our goal to move our co-workers to Yahoo Mail."
The executives went ahead to summarise their point with the following statement:
"But whether it's familiarity, laziness or simple stubbornness dressed in a cloak of Ayn Randian Objectivism, the time has come to move on, comrade."
According to the leaked memo, only 25 percent of Yahoo employees abandoned Microsoft Outlook to use Yahoo Mail, which means 75 percent are still reluctant to make the switch.
The two executives, Jeff Bonforte, senior vice president of communications products, and Randy Roumillat, chief information officer took the timeout to imply that the remaining 75 percent will have to switch over soon, though they did not specify whether or not it is mandatory for employees to use Yahoo Mail 100 percent throughout a work day.
The best section of the memo is how the executives snarkily badmouthed Outlook as a pre-web application among other things. Some might not see this as professional, but for what it is, it's quite a funny and interesting read:
"First, it doesn't feel like we are asking you to abandon some glorious place of communications nirvana. At this point in your life, Outlook may be familiar, which we can often confuse with productive or well designed. Certainly, we can admire the application for its survival, an anachronism of the now defunct 90s PC era, a pre-web program written at a time when NT Server terrorized the data center landscape with the confidence of a T-Rex born to yuppie dinosaur parents who fully bought into the illusion of their son's utter uniqueness because the big-mouthed, tiny-armed monster infant could mimic the gestures of The Itsy-Bitsy Pterodactyl. There was a similar outcry when we moved away from Outlook's suite-mates in the Microsoft Office dreadnaught."
This experience should be a clear sign to Yahoo as 75 percent of its workforce refuse to use the in-house email program. It could be that Yahoo Mail does not connect with a majority of the workforce, and if that's the case, then it could also mean it fails to connect with the general web email consumer.
