[svlug] Time to dump those yahoo accounts

[Don Marti]

begin Erik Steffl quotation of Sat, Feb 02, 2008 at 03:14:14PM -0800:
> Don Marti wrote:
> > begin Christian Einfeldt quotation of Fri, Feb 01, 2008 at 12:40:02PM -0800:
> > 
> >> Yeah, acceptance seems likely, but looky how much ground Microsoft will have to
> >> make up to catch Google:
> > 
> > The big impact will be the feature-development time
> > lost, while they move Yahoo's infrastructure over
> > to the MSFT platform.   (MSFT is actually much more
> > technically dogmatic than your typical Linux-using
> > company.)  It'll be like Hotmail, but on a larger scale.
> 
>    (disclaimer: I work for yahoo (so I'm trying not to use any inside 
> facts explicitly plus I guess I am biased))
> 
>    like hotmail on a larger scale? shooting for some kind of 
> understatement award?
> 
>    just try to imagine the amount of software needed for everything 
> yahoo does (even if you strip it down to essentials), the users, the 
> advertisement, the content and the need for everything to sort of work 
> together...

Yes, you're right.  Huge task.  The smart thing
for them to do would be to re-brand Yahoo BSD
as "Microsoft Windows 2009: Really Big Web Site
Edition" and offer it as a product with Mono on top.
The Yahoo software keeps working, they can say it's on
"Windows", and life goes on.

No matter what happens, they're likely to kill off
as many of the Yahoo web properties as possible,
and turn them into redirects to MSN or Live.com
projects that have more internal political juice, or
to Facebook which is MSFT's next likely acquisition.
(Like I said, the Google cafeteria is ordering extra
prime rib for recruiting lunches.)

>    heh it's would be pretty funny, if microsoft actually buys yahoo then 
> microsoft will be one of the prominent success story of apache, freebsd, 
> linux, perl, php, gcc etc. Imagine redhat boasting - hey even micosoft 
> uses our OS! now that would be a lol moment.

Any RHT boasting would be drowned out by "neener,
neener, BSD rules" from the Apple advocates.
But OS fanboyism is strong enough at MSFT that upper
management would put BSD-to-Windows migration ahead
of a lot of other tasks.

I really wish they wouldn't.  Somebody need to put
together a credible competitor to Google AdSense,
and porting a bunch of existing software out of brand
pride isn't going to make that happen.  An ad price
war is just what a lot of independent sites need.

(Anyway, they won't structure it as a $50 billion
acquisition -- it'll be Yahoo pays MSFT $50 billion
to settle its patent licensing bill, MSFT buys Yahoo
for $100 billion.)

-- 
Don Marti                    
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti at zgp.org