I’m quite annoyed at Microsoft’s bid to buy Yahoo!
I’m a happy user of several Yahoo services but given the services overlap between the two and what Microsoft wants Yahoo! for, I fear for future of the Yahoo services (I’m a paying customer for some of them).
I fear because I’ve chosen to use them and for the way I go about online things, I feel they are superior to the competing offerings from MS, Apple or Google (in areas like user experience, platform agnosticism, integration between services and use of open standards).
After some grumpy start following Yahoo’s ingestion of Flickr, I’ve actually started to like Yahoo! integration between web services and I like their openness (use of microformats, restful apis, recent adoption of OpenID).
Most importantly though, I’ve got quite a few former colleagues and friends working at Yahoo! and I can just imagine how p**ed off they are at the moment.
I think, in my humble opinion, part of Yahoo!’s troubles comes from not having played the openness card in all their areas of business. I’m thinking about Instant Messaging where they slept with Microsoft and Search where they stood alone. That way they let MS think that there are “synergies” possible or a common vision can be shared.
It would be different, if say, Yahoo! were part of a cloud of interacting open APIs with liberal licensing between coo-petitors, partners, clients.
Elsewhere, Daring Fireball is making a layman’s translation of a Yahoo! memo about the subject.
Also, Roughly Drafted has an article about Microsoft’s intention and why everyone is going to loose if the bid goes through. The article is interesting as it’s full of background and historic information.
In another part of the web, the TechCrunch blog proposes a solution for Yahoo! (or the new entity) to survive in the Search market.
Finally, Yahoo! has rejected (for the moment) Microsoft’s offer.
February 13th, 2008 at 7:20 am
The company I’m working for uses microsoft’s services as standard. So, a new hotmail address was created for me. After some weeks, I said: I can’t use this service anymore, it sucks.
MSN, like Yahoo!, adds a message ads on each mail I send. Gmail doesn’t.
Messages aren’t threaded, and to search for the origin of a mail, it takes me about 10 minutes.
It is really slow.
So, I told the bosses I will use Gmail. Unfortunately, you can’t transfer automatically mails addressed to your ms account into other mail.
Microsoft is like the AIDS virus, once you get it, you’ll have it through the rest of your days, even if you hate it.
Now, I have to manage the 2 accounts.