[svlug] Time to dump those yahoo accounts

[Don Marti]

begin Erik Steffl quotation of Mon, Feb 04, 2008 at 06:11:27PM -0800:

> > A big company doesn't act like one economically
> > rational decision maker.  Companies are made up of
> > people with their own interests, and acquisitions
> > usually come together in a way that only makes
> > sense from a political point of view.  Remember when
> > Compaq bought Digital and they ended up with Compaq
> > engineering and Digital marketing?
> 
>    hmmm... true but still, why do you think they want yahoo? as far as I 
> can tell we are mostly the brand with lots of users,

Yes, but there's what the acquiring company wants
to have happen in an acquisition, and what actually
does happen.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ianaberle/2241636043/in/pool-microsoft-keep-your-evil-grubby-hands-off-our-flickr/

Software companies are used to buying competitors "for
the users" and moving them to the acquiring company's
products.  BEA, FoxPro, Informix, Adobe Freehand...

  http://daringfireball.net/2005/04/adobe_translation

Will that work on the web, where users' cost of
switching is lower?

> >> http://www.securityoffice.net/mssecrets/hotmail.html
> > 
> > I like that report, but the most important part was
> > what it didn't say.  _Why_ was the application being
> > ported?  It just was.   That's just how it works.
> 
>    cause they were ashamed to use linux, that much is obvious (I guess 
> that's what you implied)
> 
> > Now repeat with _every_ team, and _every_ application.  
> 
>    synergy :-) team and applications work together, what you can apply 
> to one you cannot apply to interconnected group of them, expecting 
> complexity to go up in linear (or even sort of linear) fashion, you soon 
> get to effort being impossible

Yahoo management will have to think about "synergy"
with MSFT, too.  The existing web properties know how
to get things done inside MSFT, and after the initial
period when a Yahoo manager is "the new hotness" he
or she will have to form alliances to get things done
in the merged company.  And you can't form an alliance
with an OS fanboy unless you run the right OS.

> > I completely agree with you that this
> > is an enormous task that will take years,
> > paralyze the company, and keep everyone from
> > getting anything else done.
> 
>    yep, that would be the end of it :-)

But a survivable mistake from MSFT's point of view.

> >>> (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.)
> >>    what?
> > 
> > Maybe not that much, but the situation just looks like
> > a good chance for MSFT to wave the "use a different
> > OS, owe us anyway" flag.  Patents also give them a
> > financial fig leaf for the OS migration -- "For what
> > we're paying to get all the Intellectual Property
> > Pack for BSD entitlements to run Yahoo Groups, we
> > could migrate to Windows and save!"
> 
>    are you saying they are going to sue themselves and to get out of 
> that lawsuit they would get rid of freebsd/linux and switch to windows?

No, not actually sue themselves, but patent licening
can be part of the intra-company "funny money" used
to justify starting a migration.

One definition of an OS fanboy is someone who would
rather fail with his OS of choice than succeed with
a different one.  And MSFT management qualifies.

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