It would appear that I may have dangerously tempted the
Fates yesterday with that remark about “the
recent degradation of Yahoo! Mail.” As I write this, the system has been
consistently responding with its generic “Temporary Error 1” message. At the
very least this means that the “try again shortly” advice has seriously warped
the semantics of “shortly.” From a more drastic point of view, Yahoo! Mail may
have gone down the path of E. M. Forster’s “The
Machine Stops,” in which those responsible for the maintenance of “the
machine” know less and less about how it works until a generation of technicians
has evolved that can neither diagnose nor solve any problems. The result is a
new society that learns to live with the machine’s errors until finally the
machine … well … stops.
Mostly, I have been using Forster as a stick to beat on Apple
over the question of whether their current team of development engineers is as
good as past teams have been, particularly
where OS X, rather than iOS, is concerned. Needless to say, we all know
that Yahoo! is in trouble. Furthermore, in our prevailing culture of instant
gratification, I have to say that I have been pleased with those opinion
pieces I have read arguing that Marissa Meyer is going to need long-range
thinking to get Yahoo! out of its current hole. However, today’s incident with
Yahoo! Mail (which I am pretty sure will be resolved, even if it is later,
rather than sooner) may be a message that Meyer needs to conduct a rather
thorough audit of all aspects of the “public face” of Yahoo! operations. On the
basis of her work at Google, I would guess that this is part of her game plan.
I would further guess that she will be very good at both implementing and
interpreting such an audit; but this may be a sign that she had better get
cracking before it is too late!
Added 3:45 PM: Since I was covering Noontime Concerts™ today, I could walk away and just see if things were back on the air when I returned. According to the time stamps in my Inbox, mail started coming in around 12:15 PM, about two hours after I filed the original post. I also watched the latest BBC News report on television and learned about the massive power failure in India. Is that where the Yahoo! Mail servers are? Just askin'.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
The Mail Machine Stops
Labels:
analysis,
authority,
consequences,
culture,
Google,
literature,
technology,
work
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