I expect Yahoo's new "Life Engine" ad campaign and positioning to fail.

First of all, "engine" is not the right word. It's too purpose-directed and technical for something as nebulous as "life," although maybe that juxtaposition was the point. It doesn't add up when you say it, though.

Second, this purported one-stop shopping message--yet another iteration of a message used with so little success by Time Warner and innumerable financial services conglomerates--doesn't mesh with the individualistic spirit of Internet usage. If you don't get exactly what you want in the way you want it, you can switch Web sites with no cost. People tend to use an amalgam of sites tailored to the particular functions that best suit them.

This is why I use Yahoo! to get sports scores (because the scores are laid out in a readable manner), but not sports analysis (I prefer the more intellectual commentary of Richard Sandomir and professional sports journalists to random wire reports); I also use Yahoo to check the stock market averages, but politely ignore the garbage Yahoo's finance page provides, such as columns from TradingMarkets.com and other schemes intended to lure investors into money-wasting hobbies.

Yahoo's new campaign asks us to buy a vision of using one company for everything we do on the Internet. This is wholly out of sync with reality. Yahoo should have launched specific campaigns around individual components of its service, instead of advocating a presumptuous and deluded vision that grinds against the very roots of the Internet's appeal.