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.
Jim Hedger is the SEO Manager of StepForth Search Engine Placement Inc. Based in Victoria, BC, Canada, StepForth is the result of the consolidation of BraveArt Website Management, Promotion Experts, and Phoenix Creative Works, and has provided professional search engine placement and management services since 1997. http://www.stepforth.com/ Tel – 250-385-1190 Toll Free – 877-385-5526 Fax – 250-385-1198
