Who was responsible for the YahooXtra debacle?

As Spark’s partnership with Yahoo enters its final month, there has been some debate online over who was responsible for the debacle.

Some have said it’s a bit rich for Spark managing director Simon Moutter to complain about Yahoo since the birth of YahooXtra in 2007 coincided with his first tour of duty at the company formerly known as Telecom (he quit as chief operating officer of its business division in May 2008 to become chief executive of Auckland Airport).

Geekzone’s Mauricio Freitas pointed the finger at former Spark chief executive home, mobile and business Chris Quin  (who was part of the senior management team decided to keep Yahoo on in 2013 after yet another round of hacking, spam and outage issues).

But Mr Quin shot back on Twitter, “Sure a contract was signed Mauricio, long time before either of us [himself and Simon Moutter]  … point is they failed and were not honest.”

Mr Quin was at least out of the frame when Telecom and Yahoo formed their joint venture in 2007 – or at least he was occupied elsewhere as head of IT services division Gen-I (now Spark Digital).

So who where does the buck stop? Paul Reynolds was chief executive at the time and of course all of the senior management and the board bear a degree of culpability over the decision.

But the man in charge of the Yahoo!Xtra launch was Telecom chief operating officer/consumer Kevin Kenrick.

In August 2007, YahooXtra was launched with a number of free bonus features for Telecom customers, including the extra mail storage usually only available to Yahoo Pro users for $US20 a year, and a Flickr (photo-sharing) pro account that usually cost $US25 a year.

But things soon went to heck.

There were widespread technical glitches as Telecom transitioned XtraMail to Yahoo’s platform, leading Mr Kenrick to announce every broadband customer would get free internet for a week as a make-good.

Telecom put the cost of the make-good at $7 million ($6 million in lost revenue plus $1 million donated to four charities of customers’ choice as an added PR measure).

Mr Kenrick – who would quit Telecom later that year to head House of Travel – conceded it was a “miserable start.”

To rub salt into the wound, Yahoo made all its paid extras free for everyone worldwide, destroying Telecom’s value-add pitch.

Today, Mr Kenrick is chief executive of TVNZ, another company undergoing a major transition (redundancies were announced last night).

Spark, which finally decided to ditch Yahoo last year, says it will complete the process of moving hundreds of thousands of Xtra Mail users to the Sam Morgan-backed SMX in mid-April.

Mr Moutter has no put a price tag on the exercise but has said that at times up to 100 staff have been working on the transition. He also said support calls for YahooXtra Mail were a major reason for $13 million in extra spending on helpdesk services.