Microsoft Crosses a Line

Wow, since Bill left, Wagg Ed seems to really have lost its grip: a columnist criticizes the Mighty MoneyMaking MSFT for toying with its food! Bill would never have put up with this, I blame Steve.

Michael Arrington thinks Microsoft crossed the line while he wasn't looking. In fact they are so far over the line they're beyond sight of it. Been there for decades.

I think he means 'crossed the line' in the Yahoo bid.

You're right that MS crossed the line, in general, long ago. Microsoft has cost the corporate world so much in lost productivity, and caused so much wasted personal time but some people just love them so much!

My wife is a personal trainer. She charges good money to make people suffer. But she said that if she wore a mask and carried a whip, she could charge three or four times as much. She'd just need a different client base.

Some people love abuse, I guess.

Microsoft generates a lot of revenue and a lot of profit, but Ballmer can't seem to do anything about the stock price.

That's what Yahoo is all about.

Quoting:"That's what Yahoo is all about."

And if Wall street believes that they'll believe that if Sperry and Burroughs get together they will solve all their internal problems that keep them from delivering good products, and beat IBM.

Quoting:Google controls too much market share and too much related search revenue. A counterbalancing force is needed to keep the system healthy. And Microsoft or Yahoo standing alone cannot counter Google.

That sounds great, except that it's not true. Microsoft will buy Yahoo with good intentions and then will unintentionally kill it because it won't know how to handle it. So, instead of two competitors, as it is now, Google will have just one unimportant and one almost completely dead.

Especially if they do toss out the current board. Great. Buy a successful company and toss out the very people who made is successful. Yeah, that's a great way to gain a good foothold in a market you've been trying to get into unsuccessfully.

Here's hoping that Yahoo stays a separate entity. Yahoo just made a very interesting move: They're releasing all their search APIs for free. That means that you can create your own search engine, define your own ranking and search algorithms and have Yahoo power everything. You don't even need to acknowledge Yahoo on your site. The only thing that you need to do is also display Yahoo's sponsored search results. IMHO a very smart move. This should draw in lots of small, specialized search portals thereby increasing Yahoo's market share.

Big search engines like Google are great, but the more content there is on the net, the more I go to specialised search engines such as Technorati or koders.com. Much less noise to filter out.

Anyone interested in building a search portal aimed at everything FOSS? :-)

Edit: See http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=9282