Here it goes: I wanted to get an account at Flickr, so I headed to flickr.com, and this is what the front page looks like:
Flickr Main Page
Ok, now I want to create an account, so I clicked on the button that says “Create Your Account”, and this is what happened:
What da F**?
Now, I am not stupid, and I do know that Flickr was acquired by Yahoo. But from a user’s perspective, why the hell do I need to sign up with Yahoo when all I needed to do was just take a look at the flickr service and upload some of my pictures? Ok, anyway, I decided to give Yahoo some credit. After all, they do own Flickr. So I proceeded. I clicked sign up, and this is what I got:
O…K…. Now I can’t forgive them anymore. Yahoo: did you think I was really going to fall for that booby trap and sign up, so that I’ll get your email address and receive tons of spam emails through it? And why would I want to give away my name when all I wanted to do was just upload my picture? I might as well go to some other smaller site and hang around there.
For reference, I checked delicious.com–another startup Yahoo acquired–to see how they handle this issue. Surprisingly, this is what I saw:
Is the delicious team more politically influential than flickr team inside Yahoo or what? How come delicious gets its own signup page while Flickr redirects it to Yahoo signup page?
Conclusion: No wonder Yahoo is failing. It is not leveraging its acquired assets correctly. Flickr would have enjoyed much faster growth and just might have provided them some chance to innovate, and they blew it. All Yahoo did was to acquire innovative startups like crazy–just like collecting stamps, and put them in a scrapbook. Way to go.
