Month: September 2005

I’m quite fond of the Ask Jeeves butler, but apparently CEO of parent company IAC, Larry Diller, has no such soft spot for him and says the guy’s gotta go. It wasn’t enough they sent him on a diet and to a tanning salon, apparently Jeeves is about to be retired.
The SearchViews article reporting this decision quotes branding expert Rob Frankel reasoning, “the butler is a vestige of the “playful, early days of the Internet””. Unh.. wha? You mean the net isn’t still wacky? Say it isn’t so… What are Google and Yahoo! if they do not appeal to the exploratory, who-knows-what-may-happen, original wacky nature of the net?
I took the opportunity to ask Rob’s opinion on this question.