Ballmer: We're Lucky Microsoft Didn't Buy Yahoo 151
alphadogg writes (quoting Networkworld): "Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer feels intensely fortunate that his company's $44 billion bid for Yahoo back in 2008 never materialized. 'Sometimes you're lucky,' he said with a smile at Web 2.0 Summit, responding to a question from conference co-chair John Battelle. Careful not to offend his search market partner, Ballmer put his comment in context, saying that any CEO would feel grateful for not making a major acquisition in the months prior to the global financial collapse that started in the second half of 2008."
We need a new Yahoo, or do we? (Score:3, Interesting)
It struck me the other day. I was searching for something on X, and the first five hits were either "Here is a page on X, at the moment it's empty, please submit your user-generated content to us here" or so-called "low-quality content", linkfarm sites that try to stay on the very borderline of legitimacy by having poorly spelled out content with meaningless "comments" to the "articles". It actually happens surprisingly often.
Not to mention when buying a piece of software, there is a 'discount code' field and you try to search and end up in a mindless wasteland of Kafkaesque hell.
Then I wished for some kind of ".nocrap.com" site that only allowed pre-checked websites that were guaranteed not to contain crap. And no, "one mans' crap is not another man's gold" - many sites are by any reasonable standard pure crap.
Then I realised what I wished for was something like Yahoo.
Yahoo? (Score:5, Interesting)
I honestly don't get why anybody would still use Yahoo. The only thing I know people still use it for is fantasy baseball/football/etc. Other than that, there really isn't a reason to stay with them. I have 1 friend who refuses to leave yahoo mail, when infinitely better web based mail solutions exist. Also, Bing and Google have the search market on lockdown. Why would you not use one of those? Any listing from another lesser search engine is going to just get you less complete and/or reliable results.
Say what you will, but I think Yahoo should just slip into the history books along with AOL and Netscape. Even in 2008, I laughed when I saw that Microsoft was going to pay $44Billion for a slowly dying search engine with mediocre webmail. Now since they didn't buy them, they get to laugh all the way to the bank. $44Billion spent on Yahoo would have most likely spelled trouble for even Microsoft, unless they could have somehow turned Yahoo into a money maker (which judging by Steve Ballmer's comments, they wouldn't have).
Facebook isn't even public yet (Score:2, Interesting)
Let FB do an IPO, and let's see if they can actually monetize there users before we start putting them in the same paragraph, let alone sentence, with the most valuable company on earth, K sparky?
Launch (Score:4, Interesting)
The best thing about Yahoo was Launch.
Yahoo could have been on a gold-mine if they marketed launch better- it was an excellent radio system and could have been much bigger than Pandora is now.
Launch's sorting-routines were much better- it varied music played better. Pandora annoys me- I like one bluegrass song- and then rather than playing the occasional bluegrass song mixed in with other genres- I never hear bluegrass for a month- and then all of a sudden it decides to play 10 in a row.
I think Pandora when deciding what to play- picks one song you liked= and then plays 10 similar songs in a row so you end up with much less variation. Launch was more random what it played.
Anyhow- I think Launch could have been huge, and possibly saved Yahoo if they marketed it correctly and not neutered it right when people were finally beginning to use it.
Definitely a change of viewpoints (Score:5, Interesting)