Microsoft and Yahoo met to discuss merger: report | Technology | Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) and Yahoo Inc (YHOO.O: Quote, Profile, Research) met on Monday to discuss Microsoft's takeover offer for the Internet company, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The meeting was said to be the first since Microsoft made its unsolicited offer for Yahoo, worth nearly $42 billion, on January 31. Yahoo rejected the offer as inadequate last month.

[From Microsoft and Yahoo met to discuss merger: report | Technology | Reuters]

I love how they call it a merger, as if the end result of this mess is going to be a new company called MicroYahoo! or something like that.

The article goes on to say that the meeting was not a negotiation, that instead it was a way for Microsoft to pitch their vision of a combined company. If by combined they meant Microsoft as it is today, plus possession of whatever Yahoo! users don't jump ship between now and the merger, plus whatever other cool stuff Yahoo! owned that Microsoft has no use for it.

Yeah Flickr, I am talking about you. You are looking forward to very limited choices in the future:

1. As is. Flickr stays as is, with a redesigned logo that adds "A Microsoft company" to it.

2. Same as #1, but with the MSN butterfly instead of the word Microsoft.

3. All of Flickr gets migrated to some new Microsoft-centric platform.

4. Whatever Microsoft uses for photo sharing is migrated TO Flickr, plus the branding changes in either options 1 or 2.

5. Flickr is left alone, maybe even as a stand alone company owned by Microsoft but retaining its own branding.



And that's just one Yahoo! owned service. This drama is going to play out on every single one of their properties.

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?