Yahoo Can't Get Its Employees To Use Yahoo Mail, Memo Reveals

Yahoo Can't Get Its Employees To Use Yahoo Mail

You know things are bad when you can't get your employees to use your company's email.

Yahoo is having a difficult time getting its employees to switch to Yahoo Mail, according to a funny internal memo obtained by All Things Digital's Kara Swisher on Sunday.

Yahoo's SVP of Communications Products Jeff Bonforte and CIO Randy Roumillat practically begged Yahoo's employees to switch to its "feature rich" Yahoo Mail service from Outlook, thanking the 25 percent (just 25 percent!) who have already made the change. The rest can't give up Outlook, and Yahoo's memo offers one reason why that may be: Employees who use Yahoo Mail apparently can't get corporate emails on the Yahoo Mail app on their phones.

"It doesn’t feel like we are asking you to abandon some glorious place of communications nirvana," Bonforte and Roumillat write in reference to Outlook. "At this point in your life, Outlook may be familiar, which we can often confuse with productive or well designed."

Yahoo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Yahoo Mail got a redesign in October, and users were furious. As part of the changes, Yahoo removed the ability to see multiple emails at once. There was such outrage over the new Yahoo Mail that a Change.org petition called "Yahoo: Bring back the old version of Yahoo Mail!" garnered almost 39,000 signatures.

"Imagine my surprise when I woke up one day and found everything in my mail was different," Alec Permison, a 13-year Yahoo Mail customer who owns a web consulting business, wrote to The Huffington Post earlier this month about the change. Permison referenced several issues with the new design, including problems simply sending emails.

Yahoo has said that it's "listening to all of the community feedback" regarding the changes.

Maybe if Yahoo employees were allowed to work from home, they'd be free to use whatever email service they wanted without anyone noticing.

Before You Go

1
Advice To Job Hunting Women
"Find something you're passionate about and just love. Passion is really gender-neutralizing," Marissa Mayer said on Martha Stewart's "Women with Vision" television series in 2011.
2
The Pie 'Isn't Big Enough'
"Right now is a great time to be a woman in tech, but there's not enough women in tech," Mayer told a CES2012 panel hosted by CNET. "[I] worry a lot of times the conversation gets really focused on what percentage of the pie is women. And the truth is, the pie isn't big enough. We're not producing enough computer scientist. We're not producing enough product designers. We need a lot more people to keep up with all of these gadgets, all of this technology, all these possibilities."Mayer also commented on the stereotypical culture within the tech world: "There's all kinds of different women who do this. You can wear ruffles, you can be a jock, and you still be a great computer scientist or a great technologist, or a great product designer."
3
Tangible Technology
"There's just huge growth and opportunity. [T]he fact that the technology is now so tangible in our everyday lives, I think, will inspire a lot more women to go into technology -- and I'm really heartened by that," Mayer said for the MAKERS "Women in Tech" interview series in 2012.
4
Internet Empowered
"I consider myself incredibly lucky to be present in a moment in time when this wonderful and powerful medium, the internet, is empowering geeks -- and especially female geeks -- to express and pursue their passions," Meyer said in a 2012 acceptance speech at the Celebrating Change gala. She had just won the International Museum of Women's first-ever Innovator Award.
5
Geekin' Out
"People ask me all the time, 'What is it like to be a woman at Google?' I'm not a women at Google; I'm a geek at Google. And being a geek is just great," she said in an interview for CNN's "Leading Women" series in 2012.

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