Cringe!

Last week (or maybe it was the week before), I walked into the Yahoo! cafeteria (oh so cleverly called URL’s), and found the above stickers plastered on every seating surface. I found them to be pretty obnoxious, and more than a little concerning…I wasn’t as concerned about what the external perception would be as much as I was worried about the internal message – that the relative goal of beating Google was more laudible than the absolute goal of creating a great product.

I was so turned off by this that I never got around to reading the (now missing) plaque that was in front of the celebratory statue. Had I done so, I would have been a little more concerned about how others might view this kind of behavior. This morning, Russ  IM’d me a link to a blog post  that would have justified those fears. The author is a former Yahoo!, who I believe now works at Google, and he bashes Yahoo! pretty hard…but, you know what, he’s right!

I hope someone is paying attention.