...but in doing so they popped mine...and I'm furious!

Xtra is our landline and broadband provider, one of my mobile phones is on their network and I've been a customer for years, during this time they have been brilliant, I've never had an issue with their service and their customer support has always been spot on with friendly, helpful and knowledgeable call center staff.

When I first heard about Xtra's decision to drop their MSN partnership and switch to Yahoo! I was a little concerned, simply because Yahoo! hasn't exactly got the best reputation for customer support but I was also anticipating that perhaps one day in the not too distant future soon we, in New Zealand, might have access to Yahoo! Messenger on our mobile phones, if not on the Telecom network then perhaps Vodafone, which is a service offered by Yahoo!7 in Australia.

The switch to Yahoo! Xtra rolled out early March 07 and the transition had little impact on my online life and sanity so I bit my tongue, apologised (in my head) to Yahoo! for not having more faith in them and carried on my merry way... but today I'm taking my apology back! I'm using this article to look back over the transition period and to see if while outlining the facts as I remember them, I can pin point where it all went so wrong...

On 13 December 2006 Yahoo!7 (Australia http://au.yahoo.com ) issued a press release "Yahoo!7 And Telecom Unveil Online Joint Venture" where they announced (in part):

...Telecom New Zealand has partnered with Yahoo!7 to form a joint venture, which will be called Yahoo! Xtra, and will provide an enhanced suite of online content and application services for New Zealanders...

''All online New Zealanders will be able to benefit from the enhanced range of news, sport, weather, and messaging services available from Yahoo! Xtra,'' said Kevin Kenrick, Chief Operating Officer of Telecom's consumer business.

''In addition, Telecom's Xtra customers will have access to a range of premium online services with mail, enhanced spam and virus protection management, online photo sharing, localised news and internet radio properties progressively becoming available after the initial launch,'' added Kenrick....

The Yahoo! Xtra joint venture will replace the existing XtraMSN site in the portal space with the initial raft of Yahoo! Xtra services due to go live around 1 March 2007...

A month later, on 31st January 2007, the New Zealand Herald followed up on this with an article Xtra responsibility for partner signals change of path for Telecom which covered the basics of the new partnership. The next few weeks were somewhat quiet, yes there was speculation and debate but it wasn't until the NZ Herald once again lead the charge with Yahoo, now what about the Xtras? published 22nd February that the issue and changes started to hit home. The article focused more on possible service information and it touched briefly on a comparison between Yahoo! 7 (Australia) services and what New Zealanders might eventually see as the relationship unfolded.

Somethings Coming...
On the 26 Feburary 2007 Xtra dusted off their ASCII skills and released an email to all existing Xtra customers.

As a customer, It was our first "official" hint at the change from Xtra themselves, they didn't actually provided any information about the services we might expect to see, overall it was all very vague... but then X started to meet Y...

When X (Xtra) Meets Y (Yahoo!)
The 2nd March 2007 saw another Xtra email arrive:

Visit xtra.co.nz and you'll notice a few changes. That's because Xtra and Yahoo! have joined up to bring you the best New Zealand entertainment and online tools.

All your favourites are still there, plus a few more treats we think will keep you happy.

Check it out now
or
Take a tour
to find out more..

I had a quick look at our new Yahoo! offering but there appeared to be nothing out of the norm or inspiring compared to what other countries already had on offer e.g Yahoo.com, which I was already a regular visitor of, so I moved on and didn't think too much more about it.

The Hype!
During the introduction and transition period there was a very slick ad campaign based around "When X Meets Y" which was seriously cool!

Xtra had never really splashed out on this sort of advertising before so it was a nice change and if you happened to be watching TV at the time their advert appeared, it certainly did hold your attention. The dropping of MSN caused a big stir but ultimately when that died down everyone was still left taking about the X Meets Y promotion and the song "Fidelity" by Regina Spektor... well done to the marketing team :)

"Fidelity" by Regina Spektor, read more here

The New Portal
The March 07 issue of Telecom's In Touch (pdf) also provided us with the following information:

When Xtra met Yahoo! at the beginning of March, a whole lot of good things started happening online.
New Zealand’s own Xtra has teamed with global online star Yahoo!
to form Yahoo!Xtra.
The result is New Zealand’s best online home for entertainment and information, a great place to explore your interests and share them with others.
Whatever you’re into, you’ll fi nd it at Yahoo!Xtra – whether that’s music, movies, games, travel, cooking, books or fi tness. Learn more about what’s happening in the world, share your opinions and meet up with others online across New Zealand and the world who share your passion.
There are great new interactive tools including expert blogs, news and entertainment polls with many more to come. And, of course, you can catch the latest local news, sport, business, entertainment and weather. We’ll keep you posted with more news about Yahoo!Xtra, including new exclusive services and content.

Hmm... it seemed that whether we liked it or not change was heading our way and it was out with XtraMSN and in with Yahoo! Xtra. For me, the impact was minimal, simply because Xtra was never my homepage, the MSN portal that had previously been on offer was too busy for my liking, I'm a Google girl and have always opted for google.com to meet and greet me.

A month or so down the track I had another quick peek, our "new" portal had the typical Yahoo! look and feel with news (world and local) an entertainment section and our much needed Xtra service links but what grabbed my attention and of course curiosity, was the Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Weather tabs, at this point I started to grow concerned but apart from weather, the mail and messenger features were marked as "coming soon" so I kicked back and waited hoping for the best but expecting the worst.

My expectations of upcoming services were minimal, I'd pretty much banked on nothing new or innovative hitting our shores. My guess; all that would be offer to Yahoo's new Kiwi audience would be the range of services and features that our cousins across the ditch (Yahoo! Australia) had access to, and had been available to them for years.

As New Zealanders, we've always had shared the Yahoo! 7 homepage, for as long as I could remember yahoo.co.nz had redirected to yahoo.com.au but not all the services our Aussie friends had access to were available to NZ users, specifically IM and mobile phone access. Yahoo! users in Australia who also used the Vodafone network had a fully functioning mobile service that if needed, held hands with Yahoo! Messenger, but despite Vodafone also being available in NZ at that time, we had no such service oureselves. My ultimate expectation was that the new Yahoo! Xtra relationship would just allow us to "catch up" with the rest of the Yahoo! world.

During the transition period I anticipated the impact on my day to day online life would negligible and this was exactly what happened from the Yahoo! Xtra introduction in March 07 and for the months immediately after the "X meets Y" release. I hadn't actually noticed, nor been aware of, any changes to our Xtra experience so my little online life carried on bump free and I was secure in the knowledge that this would be the case for quite some time to come as I had little intention of changing or upgrading our current Xtra services to any new Yahoo! offerings that might arise.

The reason for this was two fold:

1. No need:
• I rarely used Xtra Web Mail so any new mail offerings or upgrades weren't an incentive nor required.
• Weather was readily available right outside my office window.. thank you window... and should I need a long range forecast all that I needed to do was take a quick trip to my local cafe where a catchup and coffee with Howard (the awesome proprietor) would furnish me with any information that I was after.
• I have been happily using the USA version of Yahoo! Messenger for many years so apart from interest sake, making a switch to a localized (NZ) version of messenger was not required. Yes, I would download and install our NZ version when it was released, but after a quick poke around I had every intention of returning to the USA version.

2. Yahoo! and reliability:
• "YaPoo" and "YaHell" are perhaps the two most common catch phrases for users trapped by a Yahoo! reliability / service issue. During my years of Yahoo! use (Messenger, Mail, Photos etc) I have successfully avoided all major issues and associated dramas. I don't believe this was all because of good planning and / or carefully avoiding the known pitfalls, it was perhaps more "luck of the draw", as such, I wasn't about to tempt fate and willingly hand over my sanity to a company that has a long standing, and well deserved reputation, for less than satisfactory customer service and care. Yahoo is great at presenting users with features, services and products that are new or innovative but they lack follow through and more often than not their services have oodles of loose ends that ultimately strangle the end user.

Says who?
I am by no means an "expert" when it comes to Yahoo, I have a few years of Yahoo! Messenger usage under my belt, most of which you will find at http://www.wackyb.co.nz, with all of our Yahoo! Messenger information dating back to v4 on offer here.

To give you a little background, WackyB has been around for a few years now, since 1996 to be exact, and during the last 11 years we've covered and released wee snippets of Instant Messenger information, but without doubt the bulk of our data, and my own personal interest, has been centered around Yahoo! Messenger and subsquently meeting / helping other Yahoo! users where time allowed.

I was, and still am, a heavy ICQ user but Yahoo! Messenger has a rather hefty footprint smack bang in the middle of my online life and between myself and Andy, we have amassed a fair amount of information, experience, utilities and most recently Yahoo! Plug-ins which for the Yahoo! Messenger side at least, appear to be a dead duck...

all we can really say about this latest developement (with yet another) Yahoo! innovation is "typical".

On the 2 March 2007 (timed with the release of Yahoo! Xtra in NZ perhaps?) Sarah Bacon, Yahoo! Messenger Product Manager, released an article over at the (official) Yahoo! Messenger Blog entitled "The Wacky(B) World of Yahoo! Messenger" which gives an overview of who we are.

In May Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day: :ar! picked up on our Yahoo! Web Messenger article, we have a personal interest in this new version, not only because it features the arrival of :bz

which would be reason enough ;) but more so because once again Yahoo! has taken a leap forward and we are left wondering / speculating if they will have the follow through that is going to be required to pull this off and be successful.

X + Y = &^%$#@!
Over the weekend Yahoo! Xtra launched "bubble" which at the moment I'm not even going to attempt to explain, all I have to say is that since their bubble burst onto the scene my online life has taken a downward spiral... I've not had access to my email for nearly 48 hours and it appears that Xtra has adopted some of Yahoo's poor customer care attitude... grrrr!

I'm not happy. As an Xtra customer I am livid!

Here I sit on Monday 20th August 2007, I've just finished choking and spluttering my way through the 6pm news on TV3 where they have reported on the bubble balls up. "Balls up" weren't their exact words but they are mine! Xtra stated that all of their 800,000+ user have now been upgraded, with the transition being so "smooth" that the majority of users never noticed the change... say what?! I don't know one single Xtra user that found it smooth, in fact most are still in the same boat as we are... no freaking email!

As today draws to a close I've given up trying to restore my Xtra email account, it's now meant to be a Yahoo! Pro Account but as per a Yahoo! norm it's as dead as duck, as it has been since Sunday when I tried to register. I also, despite changing my pop and port settings, have no access via Thunderbird... but tomorrow is another day.. and should all turn to custard at least we can now make the switch to Vodafone.

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