Greg's Corner

Yahoo kicking itself while it’s down

It was bad enough when it was revealed that Yahoo had been hacked to the tune of 500 million users, now it turns out there nay have been more. Many AT&T and SBC-Global email accounts were set up through Yahoo servers and many users have been reporting that they’ve been unable to change their passwords.

Then, in what could be considered a bad PR move, Yahoo has temporarily disabled email forwarding. That means if you were leaving Yahoo and wanted your email forwarded to your new address, you wouldn’t be able to do that now. It can be understood that Yahoo would want to stop hemorrhaging users, but to use technical sleight of hand to prevent them from leaving is questionable at best.

So it should come as no surprise that with all of Yahoo’s problems, Verizon is asking for a $1 billion discount in the asking price for Yahoo. Can you blame them? It shouldn’t come as a surprise if Verizon even decided to back out of the deal.

If Yahoo continues to have these kind of controversies it may find itself in the ever-increasing graveyard of tech companies that failed to achieve their full potential.