I’m feeling sad about the M/Y! deal. (Which I expect to sail through—from the Yahoo! management/investor point of view, what’s not to like?) You see, Yahoo! was the first actual real successful Internet business. And Microsoft, well, they’re a bunch of things, but they’re not an Internet company.
I was there at the beginning; my company had a brief partnership with Y! back in 1995, when they were David and Jerry and seven others in a shitty little strip-mall in Mountain View, with an ant problem; well, they slept and ate pizza in their offices, what do you expect? In a shabby machine-room next door was quite a bit of netscape.com and playboy.com.
There was a golden moment there when if you wanted to do whatever on the Internet, you’d go to whatever.yahoo.com and there it’d be. Today, I use Y! Finance and that’s about it.
On Twitter and I’m sure by email and phone, the wolves are circling the good Y! engineers. Yowl. Man, this is gonna be big and slow and ugly.
Contributions
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Sander (Feb 02 2008, at 07:33)
The thing I'll miss most once MS kills it off will be YUI. I really hope a good community will spring up to keep it alive. They'll have a major challenge on their hands keeping the same level of quality in all its aspects though - especially documentation, where YUI is unsurpassed.
There's _so_ much value in Yahoo! which simply will evaporate once Microsoft gets going. :/
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From: Alex (Feb 04 2008, at 17:37)
I predict MS will have to spend at least another 0.25 gigabucks in retention bonuses to keep even a skeleton crew of Y! engineers on board long enough to do any kind of useful brain transplant.
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