Charles on… anything that comes along

I came across Flickr signup: From human to droid in a Yahoo moment? - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals) last night, and thought it interesting: it details how the easygoing, yet informative signup to Flickr has changed since Yahoo! took it over into the sort of registration nightmare that leaves you tearing your hair out and swearing, as it asks for your mother’s maiden inside leg name. Stupid, stupid, stupid, I thought.

But Yahoo! just keeps piling Pelion on Ossa. In Quicktime’s hot tips there’s a link to the forthcoming Fiona Apple album (’Extraordinary Machine’ has been re-produced), which has a video, which is on Yahoo!.

You’re probably catching the drift already.

So I go there, and search for the video, and it’s here. So I click to play it.

No, says the dialog, if you’re on a Mac, you must use Netscape 4.7x to view this. Huh?? Netscape 4.7 is from the Classic era - that means it’s more than four years old. Talk about not having your customers’ interests up front. I tried pretty much all I could with Safari, masquerading as Windows IE 6 and Netscape 4.79; no dice.

I conclude that Yahoo is thoroughly, corporately, borked. They can’t do signups; they can’t do browsers. What, exactly, can they do well?

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Doing the math on music videos: surprisingly cheap (17 February 2005; score: 91.75%)
• At last, a Flickr account (11 May 2005; score: 62.56%)
• Another prediction comes right: iTunes Music Store now selling videos (10 May 2005; score: 62.13%)