After learning the fate of Jeeves, the long serving butler mascot
of Ask Jeeves fame, a number of bloggers have banded together to try
to resurrect the affable chap from the dotcom dustheap.
Written by a former employee of Ask Jeeves who wishes to remain
anonymous, the SAVE JEEVES blog reads like an evangelical rant against
the corporate makeover Barry Diller and his InterActiveCorp are
performing.
Take this paragraph for instance, "It would seem that the
new owners of the company (Interactive Corp), are not too fond of
the butler, and they would like to see him go. More specifically,
if rumors on the Internet are to believed, it would seem Barry Diller
himself wants the butler's head on a plate."
The writer notes that Diller and co want to cut the Bulter in a
bid to be considered more serious. He then goes on to mention,
"In fact - it's a painfully curious oversight that the IAC
and Ask Jeeves execs can't see that Google and Yahoo's own meteoric
rise was brought about, in part, by their very non-serious approach
to business. Google long prided itself in it's quirky name, and
often-changing artwork that showed the company's fun-loving and
human side. Yahoo, despite being deeply ingrained in business-people's
minds as a seriously powerful business, still sports a name that
your average user can yodel in goofy delight. And MSN, despite being
the most "serious" of the big search engines, and leveraging
their almighty monopoly over the computing world (read: cheating)
- still cannot gain traction against the other sites. Face it, the
Internet is intimidating and inhuman enough as it is, nobody is
going to visit you more often because you have decided that your
site has too much personality, and would be better off being "serious"."
A variety of comments to the blog entry show that the vast majority
of readers agree and would like to see Jeeves saved to serve another
day.
|