I was chatting with a friend yesterday and he remarked that Yahoo‘s presence on his machine was getting really intrusive. We both agreed that “Yahoo was the new AOL.” Large flashing icons and screens, exhortations to download this and download that, default settings to automatically run everything at startup, encouragement to download the Yahoo branded IE7, etc. From my perspective, that’s not a good sign. Tricking users into using your product more rather than delivering utility which keeps them coming back seems like a dangerous path to go down.

While it may seem like I’m Yahoo-bashing, it had been my primary platform (start page + email) since 1997. Last year, I switched to Google.