But from the perspective of Yahoo! users the more important question is whether a MS takeover will turn Yahoo! into tepid porridge? And will the long, slow decline of Microsoft now drag Yahoo! down too?
I certainly hope (and think) so!
I was a loyal and early user of both Yahoo and Microsoft products. There is nothing like a loyal user scorned.
Microsoft's version to version bloat, buggyness, and most of all, attempts to lock one product inextricably to another, plus their habit of acquiring other companies who's products I used, only to simply discontinue them or render them unrecognizable -- all of this, finally, drove me away in disgust. I gave up my career in order to avoid having to deal with MS crap.
What puzzles me is how you (and others) cannot see that Yahoo is made in the same mold as Microsoft already.
I've been (unfortunately) involved in some Yahoo Groups for a long while and countless times have had to explain the tortured process for an outsider to sign up for Yahoo Groups, involving them not only giving up (or faking) a lot of personal information, but also agreeing to take a Yahoo e-mail address as part of the process. How many of the claimed bazzillion Yahoo e-mail addresses are (as I suspect) mostly unused? I'd guess a lot. I had one guy tell me he never could remember his Yahoo sign-on, so every time he wanted to check the messages in the group he would just sign up for Yahoo all over again. Their stuff is so crappy it makes me sick to even think about it.
Do you use Flickr without paying the premium fee? I can't imagine why anyone would. They keep everything you upload, but hide all but the last 200 pictures from you. This is the most retarded scheme I've ever heard of. They must have the largest collection of unaccessible information on Earth! To help them out I just continue to upload files. I keep the pictures I actually want to view on Google. Flickr has had a lot of service outages, and for me is often painfully slow. Is it any wonder?
How can you stand all the stupid animated graphics that Yahoo throws at you? Half my screen real-estate and 90 percent of my bandwidth is used up with this silly junk when I go to a Yahoo page.
I know only one or two people who use Yahoo as their primary e-mail account, and maybe not coincidentally these are the people who don't seem to have their e-mail act totally together, don't respond to important messages, can't keep their CCs and BCCs straight, and since they are universally Windows users, are often having serious computer problems anyway ("Sorry, I haven't been able to check my e-mail in three weeks, my computer keeps locking up, got any ideas?").
These two companies are a match made in heaven. I wish them the greatest of happiness, and I hope they alienate a few billion more users along the way so that the rest of us can stop playing the role of free tech support for them.
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