I just hope that however any of this falls out, Flickr survives and starts to see some attention. I really, really like Flickr (pay for it even) and don't want to see it die. I actively dislike the competitors in the social photo uploading space (cannot stand Picassa's UI, and Facebook is, well Facebook. Photos are not the primary function there). Flickr suits my needs just perfectly.
Anyone trying to meaningfully compete with Google will need to both buy and build their way into contention. MS has the money to do both but so far the build side of the equation has been a bit lacking.<p>Don't get me wrong-MS has some very (technically) cool products and projects out there (WP7, win8, Xbox to name a few) , but none of them are giving them the halo that Google (or Apple) has. It will take years of marketing and [m/b]illions of dollars to move them out of the funk that they've built up for themselves over the years. American car makers faced similar marketing challenges in the late 90's-00's and are only recently turning heads again.
I really hope (for Yahoo's sake) this happens. About half a year before I left, Yahoo turned down the offer from Microsoft that was in the $30/share range. I couldn't believe it.<p><a href="http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/feb08/02-01corpnewspr.mspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/feb08/02-01cor...</a><p>Yahoo was bleeding then and has been bleeding ever since, still trying to be too many things to too many people--none of them well.<p>Hopefully MSFT can clean house, invest where it's needed, and put things on track.
Yahoo really needs to enlist Shpigler the Shark this time:
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=650U4-9CPew" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=650U4-9CPew</a>
Since 2009, Microsoft has lost $5.5 billion on Bing and is losing $1 billion every quarter.<p>How is this even possible and how is buying Yahoo going to plug the holes? Bing search is horrible and their adcenter product is even worse.