Hoping that Yahoo Doesn’t Sell Out

My buddy David pointed out this morning the offer by Microsoft to buy Yahoo. I think Oh noes! C'mon, why do they have to go and f*ck up a perfectly good thing? I hardly use Yahoo but one of the services that is worth paying for (as I have done) is Flickr. If you don't know, Flickr is owned by Yahoo. Yahoo is great for a few things, like their Answers service, and the messenger is good and a few other things, but I mostly don't use it. Except for Flickr!

Flickr simply kicks any other image sharing site's ass. Any time, up and down the block and not twice, but three times on Sunday. I am afraid that if the deal goes through, we'll be forced to the usual Microsoft crap. I can already imagine it...

We'll probably have to use the lame Microsoft Spaces, or one of their many other half-assed offerings just to sign in. You know they'll botch up the great system that Flickr is. They'll probably break the way that you upload pictures, the way that you add contacts, the tags, the slideshows, and last but not least the API for other sites to interact with your images. And surely you'll get spammed regularly. Not to mention that you'll need Internet Explorer to access it, or to get it to display correctly, you'll have very little support for computers that aren't running Windows. Ultimately users will choose the next best thing and bail, in search of a better way.

Lets hope that if Yahoo does sell out, Flickr is only marginally affected by the purchase.

The offer came yesterday, apparently after 18+ months of discussions. The offer is for 44.6 Billion. That is insane when you put the number in perspective. The offer also made Yahoo stock shoot up quite a bit. I'm sure this made Yahoo stock holders happy at least for the time being.