Saturday, February 2, 2008

And so the Microsoft/Yahoo soap opera starts


Image by judland, used under the Creative Commons license.


Earlier today, we were set us up the bomb: Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo, badly. They are willing to pay $44.6 billion for it. That figure kept most of the people busy until sometime this afternoon some genius figured out that, horror of horrors, Yahoo owns Flickr!


Oh boy, we got us a rebellion.


This is the kind of thing that I was referring too a while ago, when I decided to bail out of Flickr into the less sexier Picasa. While Picasa is nothing more than a simple photo dump (with really handy hooks to online printing, thank you), Flickr is a full fledged community. And what is an integral part of every community? Douche bags that think that they own the site and that its mere existence is a constitutionally protected right. $25/year buys them the right to dictate to stock holders how the company should be run.


Where were they when Flickr was sold to Yahoo? Yahoo is a big faceless monster, no different than Microsoft. Why these people did not go up in arms?


Suddenly Picasa looks extremely attractive, don't you think?



0 comments: