Kudos to Yahoo! Photos
Yahoo! Photos is closing. I got an email from them over the weekend. Here's a section of it:
We will officially close Yahoo! Photos on Thursday, September 20, 2007, at 9 p.m. PDT. Until then, we are offering you the opportunity to move to another photo sharing service (Flickr, KODAK Gallery, Shutterfly, Snapfish, or Photobucket), download your original-resolution photos back to your computer, or buy an archive CD from our featured partner (for users of the New Yahoo! Photos only). All you need to do is tell us what to do with your photos before we close, after which any photos remaining on Yahoo! Photos will be deleted and no longer accessible.
Of course, we hope you'll join us at Flickr (you can even use your Yahoo! ID), but we also realize that Flickr may not be for everyone. In the end, we want you to find the service that's right for you, and we hope you take some time to learn more about your options before making this important decision.
That's an exceptional marketing move - give people the option of automatically migrating to a non-Yahoo!-owned photo service. Forcing everyone to migrate to Flickr would have been the easy thing to do, but this is smarter. People like choices, and there will be people who are angry that Yahoo! Photos is shutting down and forcing them to change services. By giving them a choice of services for migration, Yahoo! gets their Miracle on 34th Street moment instead of bad press.
Nicely done.
2 comments:
Whoa, are you kidding me? I just closed both of my Yahoo e-mail accounts and I'm FURIOUS with Yahoo. Why? I received ZERO notice that they are closing Yahoo Photos. ZERO. I found out about it by accident. I don't have a problem with them making a business decision to close Yahoo Photos, but they way they are handling it displays their "Jimmy crack corn and we don't CARE" attitude towards their loyal users. Some of us received no e-mail notification, like me. But in all cases, the window of time to move your photos is way too SHORT for anyone with many photos stored in Yahoo albums, even if you want to switch to flickr or one of the choices they offer versus downloading each photo one by one so that you can truly choose where to store them. They give users a few months over the summer, when many folks are away and off line? This is horrible customer service. I have moved my photos to Picasa (a Google service). btw, flickr only will display your first 200 photos for free. If you want access to more than that, you will have to pay.
See ya, Yahoo, this was the last straw in a long line of poor customer service straws.
Well, the part of the email that I praised is not worth much if the email doesn't make it to the user, obviously.
I'm not sure I agree about the amount of time to migrate though. "a few months over the summer" seems pretty reasonable to me.
But regardless, my praise was intended to be very specific, and not a generic statement about Yahoo! And I stand by my statement that providing a way for users to migrate to other vendor's services is a smart move.
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