Flickr VS. MicroSoft

i was away for few days being cut of line is a terrible issue you never knew what happened and what didn’t

anyway , i recently heard that the big mother of windows OS is Offering good sum of bucks to buy yahoo services .

Darren Waters on BBC dot life

At first glance, it would seem that Google’s success is the key motivator for Microsoft’s bid. But it’s more complicated than that.

Certainly, a Microsoft and Yahoo joint search engine would in theory give Google some competition in the search and online ad business. But even a combined Yahoo and Microsoft search proposition would still be a long way behind Google.

According to comScore, the worldwide search figures for last August show Google way out in front:

# Google Sites: 37.1 billion (5 billion at YouTube)
# Yahoo Sites: 8.5 billion
# Baidu.com: 3.3 billion
# Microsoft Sites: 2.2 billion

To highlight one point: twice as many people make searches on YouTube alone than make searches using Microsoft’s search engine.

But this is about gearing up for the second internet age – an age where commerce, community and communications are dominated by the web.

Microsoft was late to the internet and the company has never denied that. Bill Gates failed to see the potential of the net and from the back of the pack Microsoft has always been playing catch up.

It’s not been all failure. From nowhere Microsoft was able to crush opposition in the browser space and Internet Explorer is the most popular way to surf the net.

But as companies like Yahoo and Google, as well as thousands of garage start-ups have shown, from Facebook to Joost, the battle was never really about the browser – it was abo…. more

Yet i found many users fear most losing the largest pictures hosting online FLICKR it’s was hilarious seeing all these people roars protesting against Microsoft and raising the flags of VIVA freedom and freeware

and in that boing boing took the lead . posting about it and over 40 users replied the same answer

the same answer

actually that was said by judland guess he was really angry that time and i do agree with him ….. boing boing article

there was also some flickr users actions in the flickr groups and all wondering how yahoo gonna answer Microsoft offer

some people fears that Microsoft covert yahoo and other services into IE only usage which i think gonna be something terrible and unable to be understood if it was done . yet we’ll wait and see

Feel to read more !! weird.com , telegraph.co.uk , techmeme.com , bbc.co.uk

steve

Microsoft’s obsession with its own technology has led to gaps in its product portfolio. Yahoo effectively fills these gaps because they’ve been succesfully exploiting them for years.

Yahoo has significant mobile presence. Yahoo has IM on non-Microsoft platforms (MSN still has the largest Windows IM presence). Yahoo also has new social-innovations in the form of Flickr. But most notably (though not obvious to us punters), is Yahoo’s successful advertising technology.

Advertising revenue is the key to Microsoft’s search engine future. We punters are searching all the time although we may not realise it. Every time we visit a page that knows something about us, search engines are working in the background to ensure we see advertising content that is most likely to secure a click from us. A Yahoo acquisition widens revenue possibilities in advertising. So far advertisers have been disappointed by returns from Microsoft Live, while at the same time returns from Yahoo and Google are still stable or growing. But advertisers could be lured back with the possibility of a Microsoft-Yahoo alliance.

There is a sting in the tail of advertising, and this is how we know the dot-com bubble is over. Because advertising is the link to the rest of the economic market, and when the market suffers, so does advertising. And, already this week we have seen disappointing financial results from Google. In the current market confidence is king, and Microsoft, even if they don’t manage to grab a big slice of Google’s advertising revenue, could yet again come out on top.

However, assuming Microsoft do succeed in acquiring Yahoo technologies, it will still be playing catch-up with Google. The good news for Yahoo employees is that this is no acquisition with a view to simply killing off some of the competition. Microsoft need Yahoo and they need to keep Yahoo’s customers sweet in the process of acquisition – they cannot risk a mass-migration to Google. They’ll be no costly consolidation of engineering, rather they’ll be increased concurrency, co-op-etition and finally yes, convergence and re-branding.