[Posted by Shar VanBoskirk]

**Update** Per the comments below, I've adjusted the title of this post to reflect that Jerry Yang is transitioning out of the CEO role, not "departing" Yahoo! overall.

This morning, Yahoo! announced that founder and CEO Jerry Yang would step aside as soon as Yahoo! found a replacement.

This weekend, Saks Fifth Avenue ran a full page ad in the NYTimes promoting "The Gift of Time. Enjoy no interest and no payments for 12 months on item purchases of $2,000 or more." I'm not surprised. This is a great message for those who may not be as liquid as they once were and for those who hope this economic situation will abate in mid '09.

It also might hit home to wary older customers. In fact, according to our recent consumer survey, where we asked: Given the current state of the US economy, how are you planning to change your holiday shopping habits? Customers over 45 years old are more likely to say they will spend less overall and avoid any major purchases. So retailers whose customer base skews older, might try the same tactic Saks has launched.

Last week I posted my impressions of the general sessions at Forrester's Consumer Forum in London (November 6-7, 2008). Today, I want to share some snippets from the Customer Experience track, which I moderated:

>> Dr. Nicola Millard (Customer Experience Futurologist - BT)

Nicola gave a very "high energy" presentation on the lessons that BT has learned from its experiences in operating contact centers -

We heard about:

- The voyage towards "appropriate automation" - using automated systems for tasks where it makes sense, but allowing humans to speak to humans when they need to. 

- The ever increasing complexity of communicating through the multiple channels that customers want to use. Just as companies get the hang of e-mail, a new generation of customers feels that e-mail is so 1999... It's time to start supporting channels such as mobile chat, online communities and so on.

- The benefits of listening to customers. BT has found that a community of its customers can identify problems with home broadband equipment faster than BT finds them. And not only do the customers find the problems, they also find the solutions.

The French music industry body Socit civile des Producteurs de Phonogrammes en France (SPPF) is suing four US based developers of P-to-P applications, including the BitTorrent client Vuze, Limewire and Morpheus and Shareaza. (The latter is the one that is stimulating vitriol in the tech blogosphere as it is developed by open source development platform SourceForge.)

Under newly revised French law the US companies can be tried in the France as their applications have not implemented filtering mechanisms to block out copyrighted material.

A couple of arguments are being leveled at the SPPF. The first that these applications aren't designed for copyright infringement. "It's not the fault of the developers that they are being used as such". This argument of course has been used since the original Napster trial. I'm sorry, but it just doesn't wash. However much there is legitimate usage, the vast majority of usage is not legitimate. All the developers need to do is support their claims off innocence by embedding filtering mechanisms into their apps. If they counter claim that this would restrict the liberty of their users, then they can't any longer argue that they don't support illegitimate usage of their technology.