Friday, July 25, 2008

Yahoo! screwed up my music Jukebox!

What was Yahoo! thinking when it purchased MusicMatch? For those not in the know MusicMatch is a "jukebox" type application for managing music on your computer. MusicMatch was the greatest; it had tons of features that I can to appreciate. And I purchased the lifetime subscription to ensure that I always had the latest upgrades. Then Yahoo! purchased MM and migrated all the users to Yahoo! Music Jukebox (YMJ). YMJ was missing dozens of features and was painfully slow. Why would anyone purchase a company for millions of dollars ($160 million), strip its product of the very features that made it superior and roll out an inferior application. Of course they wanted the customers, but did they really lose sight of the fact that the superior application that MM had is the reason the customer base was so big? I can picture the strategy meeting when the purchase proposal was first made: An over-paid executive stands up and says, "Let's grow our Yahoo! Music business by purchasing MM and moving the customers to the Yahoo! Music family of applications. We'll make tons of $$ by extending all the great services that Yahoo! Music has to offer!" The sane question from the quiet corner of the room: "What is Yahoo going to do with the MM application?" Answer: "We don't need no stinkin' MM application. Yaaaaahooooo!" Idiot. Was no one in the boardroom willing to stand and say the 'Emperor has no clothes!' Anyway, after a year of struggling through YMJ to justify my lifetime subscription to MM, I finally had to say so long to YMJ and found a new jukebox application called Media Monkey. These guys are like the old MM; really trying to meet customer needs by adding new, cool features all the time. I have just one request: Please don't sell out to Yahoo! In fact, just to be safe, don't sell out to anybody. What's $160 million gonna buy you anyway?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I feel your pain. Even after all these years, I can't belive the utter failure in Yahoo! getting involved in destroying this most awesome program of all time. I still use it going into 2012 for bit rate conversion. That's about it's only useful function now. What a shame!