Ex-Employee Crusades to Save Jeeves

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

Last week we reported that Barry Diller’s $1.85 billion acquisition of Ask Jeeves would also involve giving the old butler the boot. As a quick re-cap, Diller’s IAC felt that most people did not understand what a butler was. There were also previous attempts to make Jeeves over with a thinner more tanned look, but eventually the new owners decided to pull the plug. Today, an ex-employee is waging crusade to save Jeeves and of course, even has a blog devoted to the cause. You can read his highly detailed reasoning, on everything from the Jeeves demographic, to the appeal Jeeves has to children, but here’s a quick aside we found interesting:

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”. Source: SaveJeeves