What's Wrong with Software Developers? [Yahoo Edition]

 

It's been a while since I've had a good rant.  At least publicly.  Much like a volcano that slowly builds up pressure over time until there is a massive explosion, I have been absorbing the stupidity, faults, flaws and outright incompetence of the various products I interact with daily, and now it is time for me to erupt.  If you recall, Spotify was the target of my last good rant about software development.  Today's rant is brought to you by Yahoo!

I have been using Yahoo! since the very early days of the World Wide Web.  I remember when it was hosted at akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo.  It was an innovative idea, and I immediately set it as my homepage in my NCSA Mosaic browser.  At the time, there were no other web-based aggregators of content (at least that I knew of) and Yahoo! provided a great starting point for finding content I was interested in (kids- this was before Google even existed).  For a fun trip down memory lane, take a look at the website history museum for yahoo.  Yahoo! took off and continued to innovate and it became more and more a part of my daily web usage.  MyYahoo! was the first enhancement that became indispensable to me.  The ability to configure a homepage with stories I was interested in, RSS feeds, weather and customize the layout was well executed and it served as my main portal to the Web up until about a month ago.  Yahoo Finance was the second offshoot that turned into a frequently used resource for me.  Yahoo Finance gathered lots of data on stocks, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs and all other financial products and presented it nicely (and for free!).  You could add your own portfolios and watchlists to keep track of stocks and other investing ideas.  You could see the daily movement and real-time quotes and get up to date news on everything in your portfolio all in one place.  It was great, and I kept it open and running every day the market was open.  Up until a couple of weeks ago.  There is also Yahoo Mail which was my first e-mail account (outside of school), that I still use to this day. 

Alas, things have been on the decline at Yahoo for years.  Early on I used Yahoo to search the web, but they got overtaken by Google and others in the oughts.  It does not seem like MyYahoo! has been maintained at all over the past decade.  Many of their story links no longer update.  Most the time the portfolio display wouldn't load.  The amount of content available seemed to shrink.  Last month they forced a total revamp of the site on all users that totally eliminated all of the customization ability that made the MyYahoo! page so great.  Furthermore, they greatly reduced the information density.  Take a look at how my page looks now.

I get about 14 headlines and descriptions on my screen.  On my old Yahoo page I probably had 50+ headlines visible in a single view organized by source or subject making it easy to quickly take in the particular information I wanted.  Sadly, I can't show you a screenshot of it as there is no way to go back.  And look at all that blank space on the left and right.  I'm looking at this on a 32" 4K monitor because I want to take in a lot of information at once with a quick glance.  All that wasted space going unused is a travesty!  Yahoo must think people only look at their page on a tiny phone screen or something.  Ridiculous!  As the site has now become useless to me, I set out to find a good replacement.  I ended up at Protopage.com.  It is a lot like the old MyYahoo! page but it seems to be up to date and actively maintained.  It has all the customizations I wanted, including colors for all items and you can add whatever RSS feed to it you want, such as ryanswisdumb.blogspot.com.  Their default landing page shows the potential.

I have added even more columns to fully utilize the space on my monitors and tailored the news to a mix of local, national and world and feeds from other sites that regularly have articles I want to read.  Since setting up my own Protopage, I have not been back to MyYahoo (except to get the screenshot above).  If driving away your viewers is your goal, I say, "Well-done Yahoo!"

The My Yahoo debacle is quaint compared to what Yahoo has done to Yahoo Finance.  Yahoo has been rolling out changes to its portfolios for a few years.  Luckily, they had always kept the option to maintain the classic view that kept me and a multitude of others happy.  At least they did up until a few weeks ago.  They did away with the classic view option and forced everyone into the new portfolios.  Whatever brilliant website developer / marketing genius / pointy-haired boss came up with this idea must have been a fan of New Coke and hated Coca Cola classic, because they decided to mess with the Yahoo Finance formula and turned it into something that is unusable for many of the previous devotees.  (Kids look up the history of New Coke for a lesson in corporate mistakes).  

The parallels between New Coke and the new Yahoo Finance are uncanny. 😉    New Coke came about as a result of some blind taste tests showing more people preferred Pepsi to Coca Cola.  In this case, perhaps Yahoo is seeing some people going to Google for finance data.  Coca Cola rolls out a new creation that is sweeter to make it taste more like Pepsi.  Yahoo creates a new Finance site that is narrower and presents less information, just like the Google site.  Coca Cola decides to stop making Coke Classic and only sell New Coke.  Yahoo Finance gets rid of the old portfolios and forces everyone onto the new one.  Customers get angry.  That's where we are now.  Coca Cola brought Coke Classic back after 79 days due to the uproar over their mistake.  Yahoo Finance... TBD.

Screwing up MyYahoo is one thing as there are good alternatives, but the Yahoo portfolios is different.  There is (or was) no better free stock viewer and stock news service out there.  When the classic view went away, I searched and searched for the link to bring it back.   I didn't really believe Yahoo would be forcing everyone onto their new turd of a site.  The biggest problem is they are not using much of the screen real estate.  I had custom views set up with a bunch of columns of data for stocks I was tracking.  Everything from real time quotes to yields, to forward earnings estimates.  All of that fit nicely on my aforementioned monitor.  Like the new MyYahoo, they inexplicably limited the width of the new portfolios and require you to scroll horizontally to see all the same information you could previously see in one glance.  Horizontal scrolling is dumb, evil, incredibly bad coding.  Does nobody at Yahoo who develops their site actually use it???  Here's a sample portfolio on the new view:

Note the horizontal scroll bar at the bottom indicating that I'm only seeing about half of my columns.  Note the circle at the top.  It is circling where the headers of the columns should be, but they scrolled off the screen and are no longer visible when I scroll down through the portfolio to actually get to the horizontal scroll bar.  Unbelievable.  A third grader could build a better website.  And note all the dead space at the sides of my screen circled in blue.  Why not use that space instead of having to scroll a tiny window at the center of the screen???  The classic view had none of these problems.  Then there is the news view below the portfolio:

In the classic view you got a compact listing of headlines with a ticker next to it, so you know which stock in your portfolio the news is relevant to.  In the new view, there is a headline and blurb and the relevant ticker is at the end of the blurb with no justification to any side, so you can't quickly scan down and look for news on one particular ticker.  The density is also terrible.  This view shows only 4 news headlines in this screen, whereas the classic view would show maybe 30 headlines in the same amount of space allowing you to scan through a large number quickly.

In short, the new Yahoo Finance is unusable for me.  I wanted to know if I was alone in my assessment of the new look.  I Googled the problem and found a few Reddit threads with some comments complaining about it.  Then I saw one with a link from a Yahoo moderator to a user site where feedback could be submitted.  Jackpot!  I could never find this link from any of the Yahoo pages, so they don't advertise it, but there was A LOT of activity on the suggestions for the Finance page.  The top vote getting proposal was to bring back the Classic view.  It had 60 or so comments when I found it and added my own opinion to the mix.   100% of the comments were in agreement that the new site was unusable and needed to be fixed or bring back the old view.  Some comments, like mine, provided specific feedback on the problems like I mentioned above.  One user posted a response they got from Yahoo in response to a direct e-mail that basically said they understand resistance to change but tough luck and get used to it.  There was no acknowledgement that the functionality was fundamentally broken.  Much like Spotify refused recognize that podcast listeners might want to listen to podcasts in chronological release order, Yahoo refuses to recognize that their new site is unusable for a huge number of power users who have come to rely on its functionality (aka the Coca Cola Classic drinkers).  Within a week, that comment thread on the hidden link exploded up over 600 comments.  That's when Yahoo deleted it and every other comment under the Finance suggestions.  The passionate users just started over with a new thread that got up to 80 comments in a day before it was deleted.  They seem to have stopped deleting them and the latest has more than 100 comments from people wanting the old view back.  There's no indication Yahoo "gets it", though.  Given how dedicated you have to be to find this link and then sign in and add a comment, the 800+ cumulative comments is likely just the tip of the iceberg of discontent.

One other topic covered by some of the commenters on the threads were alternatives you could move to as a replacement for Yahoo Finance.  I went through these with great interest and explored many more options on my own.  I concluded there is no single site that does everything as well as Yahoo Finance used to.  Google finance, which Yahoo is apparently trying to emulate, isn't good.  I now use Seeking Alpha for portfolio views.  It can get most of the same data the Yahoo Finance portfolio could and can fully utilize the width of my screen, so I am satisfied with that.  

The news on Seeking Alpha isn't good every article they provide seems to be behind a paywall.  For portfolio news, I started using a site called Finviz that is mostly about different ways of visualizing markets and portfolios, but they happen to have a news feed that is almost like the old Yahoo Finance portfolio news, but even better.  You have the option of selecting which sites you want to get news from, so you can weed out those that require a subscription you don't have.  Here is an example news stream from Finviz.

Note that they still have some coding problems with ads covering part of the stream, but at least it is usable and acceptably dense.

Using two different sites is not ideal, but at least I have alternatives to Yahoo that I can get by with.  I'm naively hopeful Yahoo is taking note of the uproar and will either fix the bonehead flaws of the new site or will bring back the classic view.

I spent some time pondering how and why this would happen.  It almost seems as if Apollo Global Management and Verizon (who own Yahoo! now) want these sites to fail.  Perhaps they aren't generating enough ad revenue and subscriptions to keep up with server cost?  That doesn't seem likely.  Maybe Verizon is forcing their famously horrible customer service onto Yahoo?  (Bonus side rant within a rant:  I just dropped Verizon Wireless as my cell phone provider after 25 years to go with Mint Mobile which nearly cuts my wireless bill in half.  Verizon has always had problems managing accounts and websites.  My passwords list contains a ridiculous 8 entries for various Verizon entities and accounts and none of them ever work when I need them.  Seriously, I have to have a different login for 1. Verizon Wireless, 2. Verizon Pre-paid wireless, 3. Verizon Residential, 4. My Verizon, 5. Fios, 6. Fios Forums, 7. Verizon Wireless Forums, 8. Verizon e-mail.  I got my account unlocked and was able to transfer my number to Mint, but now I can't get back into my account to cancel my recurring payment anymore.  Hopefully Verizon realizes that moving a phone number and blocking access to my account should end the recurring payment for service as well and not bill my credit card again.  Ha ha ha!  I fully expect I am going to have to call my credit card company and dispute a charge in a few days when Verizon bills me anyway.)

Since I'm on the topic of cell phones, I have a beef with the Yahoo Mail app for Android.  The Yahoo Finance daily newsletter comes in with a font so tiny that it is pretty much unreadable on my phone in bed in the morning.  The Android level font size settings have no effect in the Yahoo app, and there is a flaw in the app if you try to use pinch-to-zoom it doesn't zoom in around where you pinched but takes you somewhere else in the message, not what you are trying to read.  Since I was setting up a new phone anyway, I tried reading my Yahoo mail through the Gmail reader and had a much better experience.  The fonts adjust to match the system font size setting and the text wraps appropriately and is much easier to read.  The downside is, Gmail only checks for mail every 15 minutes, so there is some delay in getting my messages.  So, Yahoo loses another ad stream from me as I no longer use their Android app.

If you are keeping score, that is 3 different Yahoo! properties that I used to use many times a day and now no longer use at all.  All of this happened in a month.  I don't own any Apollo Global Management stock, and I don't know how large a percentage of their portfolio Yahoo is, but from where I stand, the future does not look bright, and I wouldn't want to hold it.  I do own some Verizon stock, primarily because it pays a nice dividend.  Verizon only owns 10% of Yahoo, so their downfall shouldn't have too serious and impact on Verizon, but I still anticipate I won't be a Verizon shareholder for much longer.  The latest round of account management headaches combined with the partial Yahoo ownership has left a bad taste in my mouth.

In conclusion, from where I stand, management at Yahoo! looks to be incompetent.  As much as I hate poor software development, I don't think fault for this debacle lies entirely with the website developers.  I expect there are many layers of management that all had a hand producing this junk.  They probably all get paid more than me too, and that just isn't right!

Disclosures:  I received no compensation or incentive for mentioning any of the products in this blog.  All opinions are my own.  I do own some Verizon stock, but not enough to prevent me from trashing them on this blog, apparently.