dukeya!

After nearly nine years at Yahoo!, this is my last week. (No April Fools.)

I joined June 1, 1999 as employee #972. That number now ranks 177 of over 14,000 current employees, so there was little I could do to shake the old-timer label.

It's been an emotional farewell to a team and company I love, but I am excited about my opportunities ahead. I'll talk about that later, but for now a quick look back:

• 10 Cubes
• 7 Bosses
• 6 Patents
• 5 Titles
• 4 Vacations longer than 1 week
• 3229 Days
• <30 Free coffees
• >100 Free tshirts
• >1,000,000,000 Installs of my products

Thank you Yahoo! and farewell.

/d

Posted by duke at 02:50 PM | Permalink

Posted by duke at 02:32 PM | Permalink

Posted by duke at 11:02 AM | Permalink

Last week my team soft-launched new versions of Yahoo! Toolbar for IE and FF. We've hardly had any time to celebrate as we gear up for broader distribution, clean up post-launch issues and prepare for next projects.

We're averaging 10k installs a day in quiet mode, so it's going to be huge when we're ready to go bigger.

Meanwhile, we were featured on the new Yahoo! Insiders community site -- where we hope to interact with our most active users.

Thanks to all our beta testers and toolbar users -- as well as to our families for sharing in our sacrifices. Our team members were in Atlanta (GA), Hillsboro (OR), Santa Clara (CA), Taipei (TW), München (DE) and Banaglore (IN) -- and I'm very proud of them all.

/d

Posted by duke at 10:40 PM | Permalink

I've been asked by friends and family about "this Panama thing". Why is it late? Why can't we get it right? Why did it make their shares of YHOO drop in price? And of course why can't I fix it?

I've heard some heroic stories about the Yahoo! folks working on Panama. In some ways, it is a horror of a situation for them to overcome. But as Filo pointed out at our last company all-hands, every team at Yahoo! has contributed or sacrificed in some way for Panama. And here's a great post from an outsider (RKG Engineering) who has a better view of Yahoo!'s Project Panama than many of us. In short, the team deserves more kudos and less flak.

/d

Posted by duke at 01:43 PM | Permalink

So why am I always so busy with work? Here's one reason we just released tonight:

http://beta.toolbar.yahoo.com

The new 7.0 beta lets you make as many buttons as you want and has brand new 21st century bookmarks as described on TechCrunch and on Search Engine Watch. We released the Beta today for US, Germany and Taiwan. You can read our own blog post here on Ysearchblog.

We also happened to ship Yahoo! Toolbar for Firefox in Japan today too.

We have a really great team at Yahoo! that pulled together to make all this happen. I'm very proud of them and grateful for their dedication.

Congrats to those who worked on this, and extra thanks to our loved ones for supporting and sacrificing for us too.

/d

 (Happy Birthday Viraj!)

Posted by duke at 09:12 PM | Permalink

How does Google get away with this? So it's not murder, but how is this not evil? I suppose one rationale would be if Google itself is to be worshipped, and any ends justify the means.

What am I talking about? See screenshot above and check out what ZDNet has to say about what "shady Google Toolbar" does now.

It's somewhat understandable given how much spyware is out there messing with your browser settings without notice, but check out what Google does even when a user tries to change the setting themselves.

Which sounds nicer to you? Google or some crazy complicated URL? (Oh, it's MSN.)

Click here for a good overview of all it's goodness. 

So what do you think?

1) Google should stop behaving like spyware.

2) Yahoo! and Microsoft should just do the same thing.

3) You like that Google does this, but wouldn't like Yahoo! and Microsoft to do it.

Be honest.

Thx,

/d

Posted by duke at 01:04 AM | Permalink

Thanks to Sean for blogging about Yahoo! Toolbar as the cool thing of the day! I appreciate how we might make IE6 just bearable for you, as I know it wasn't easy for you to even think about not using Firefox. How about some thoughts about Yahoo! Toolbar for Firefox?

/d

Posted by duke at 09:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Smart Computing put out a special issue entirely about Yahoo!, and products from my team received three great mentions:

• Yahoo! Toolbar
• My Yahoo! Ticker (Beta)
• Toolbar again as part of My Web 2.0

The folks writing the pieces did a nice job covering the main features and benefits. I especially liked how they included our message boards, communities and help pages in case people had any questions.

Thanks Smart Computing!

And if anyone would like a copy, leave a comment and I'll buy you one.  ;-)

/d

Posted by duke at 08:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My team gave us a generous gift certificate to Toys R Us when Jaden was born. Although we bought this last summer, it was quite challenging for Jaden back then. Now he's practically ready to jump off. Thank you Yahoo! Team! Jaden really enjoys your gift.

More picture of Jaden enjoying his gift from my team at Yahoo!

/d

Posted by duke at 12:26 PM | Permalink

We were just having a team meeting for our latest Yahoo! Toolbar Beta, and we wished our users could see how helpful their feedback is and how grateful we are for them.

We've had over 50k installs of the latest beta, generating over 1200 feedback messages. We know what it's like to test beta products and how thankless it can feel. Everyone gets an impersonal auto-response confirming we received their feedback, and if you hear from us again it's because we're hoping we can bug you for a problem we're not able to reproduce. But although it's impractical to personally write back to everyone, we really do read every message. I'll admit not every message is valuable, but we don't know which ones are until we read them all!

Beta testing can be fun, but I wish it didn't feel so thankless. I've been doing this over 10 years, and it's just not possible to develop consumer software without beta testers. In this upcoming Y! Toolbar release, we've again made many changes and fixes based on ideas and feedback from our beta testers. So thank you beta testers!

/d

Posted by duke at 11:30 AM | Permalink

I don't want my first post about work to be negative, so I'm not going to write about the problems I had with support from my own company. But if you have any problems with Movable Type on Yahoo!, drop me a line.

Instead I'll chime in on what everyone else in the industry has been talking about: Google Analyst Day (GAD). Egads, they've got so much going on, they're turning into us. Also like us, they have a large war chest and pretty much no debt, so more power to solving the worlds problems while making money doing it. But I'm dismayed that at the end of the day, the Google plan seems to be to not rely on any plan. Perhaps it's typical Google attitude: we're going to do whatever we feel like, and you're all going to think we're cool. It's just so different from my group at Yahoo! which has clearly stated objectives and a plan to actually do it. Of course I'm also jealous that Google often gets away with this.

There's plenty of coverage on GAD, but one fun tidbit was how they "accidentally" mentioned their revenue forecasts ($9.5b?) while they decline to give financial guidance. Perhaps they need more practice at this. But it's awesome that Google can hold an event for analysts and then refuse to tell them what they all want to know -- which is how much money do they think they'll make? Go Google go.

/d

Posted by duke at 05:17 PM | Permalink