I do not agree. The reason logos usually are expensive and take months: Because what else? If I have a multi-million Dollar marketing budget, sure the logo will take a good chunk of that, not only, say one permille (still enough to pay 5 designers for a week). If I want to change the perception of my company, I will not rush.
Does this mean the logo will perform better than one a design student made over the weekend? No.
Do many months of work prevent a failure? No.
In the end, Yahoo wants profit through revenue through site usage through loyal users. Does letter spacing have an influence on this? I doubt it.
Seems like anti-intellectualism. Just because you can't recognize an outstanding logo doesn't mean there is no such thing - it is an art form and a science, which is the reason there are superstars in the field who command hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees. (Whether or not a logo has a real impact on business performance is another discussion.)
Science you say? Yahoo changed it's logo daily last month. Let's have a look at how the search queries went down with every bad logo proposal (some really looked horrible).
I'd be interested in some blind study: Give some top notch designers a logo of a real, say, investment bank, from a foreign country, and an alternative proposal from a design student, and let them explain which is the real one and why. Has anyone ever seen such a study?
Does this mean the logo will perform better than one a design student made over the weekend? No.
Do many months of work prevent a failure? No.
In the end, Yahoo wants profit through revenue through site usage through loyal users. Does letter spacing have an influence on this? I doubt it.