[geeks] Flicker users u in arms over MS acquisition...

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Mon, Feb 04, 2008 at 07:48:16AM +0000, Mark wrote:
> I thin MS bought Yahoo in order to get a damn clue about what it is  
> they need to succeed on the Web. They haven't so far and that stand  
> out as a huge blot on a very blotted copy book, that getting more  
> blotted every year. It's kill or cure, IMHO.

I think they bought it for the exact opposite reason. They wanted
"eyeballs". This reeks of the AOL purchase of ICQ. IMHO in the end
you will be reading email forums as "Hotmail Groups", look up web pages
using Microsoft Search, instead of Yahoo and so on.

In 5 years Yahoo will be a distant memory. 

When Yahoo started, it was a "geek" thing because only geeks
had computers, and darn few of them "had the Internet". Now it's
a commodity item, and Microsoft has the right idea from their
point of view. Buy Yahoo, add its features to their products 
and the consumers will move over without complaints. 

The people that complain are the ones that they don't want anyway,
because they want things that 99.99% of the users don't care about,
such as bug free software, usefull features and easy-to-use UI's.

More importantly than the demise of Yahoo, was the end of Netscape.
I have seen many people commenting that it was their first web 
browser. I remember when they were a for profit company that
started business by raiding the NCSA Mosaic team, take a free
resource and making it cost money.

Geoff.


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Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
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