Saturday, December 14, 2013

Marissa Mayer Puts a Personal Face on the Yahoo! Mail Problem

Last night Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer used the company's Tumblr blog to post an "official" apology for the Yahoo! Mail outage problem. This was a relatively "frank and open" statement of the nature of the problem; but it was interesting that it said little about whether or not it had been resolved. To the contrary, there was something vaguely disquieting in the final sentences:
While our overall uptime is well above 99.9%, even accounting for this incident, we really let you down this week. We can, and we will, do better in the future.
It almost seemed as if Mayer was saying that things were better than the looked, which was not exactly the right thing to say to those whose Mail service had been affected. My overall impression reminded me of the immortal words of George Burns:
The secret to great acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you've got it made.

No comments: