What If Yahoo Was Acquired?

Johnathan Swift writes "As one of the biggest of the big on the Internet, Yahoo! is hardly a favorite of those Slashdot folks who like their net small and personal. Yet among its competition as a mega-portal -- AOL and MSN -- Yahoo! is different, and not just because it relies on free software like FreeBSD and Linux. This article in the San Jose Mercury News claims that, unlike the others, it still serves as a portal to the greater Internet rather than the "walled gardens" of AOL or MSN that try to isolate people from the rest of the net. If Yahoo! should merge with or be acquired by a media company like Disney or Viacom, it, too, would become such a walled garden, and the Internet would be that much closer to control by a few large corporations."

Comments

Acquired....like SlashDot?

[telvin]

Man..if I wasn't setting myself up for a flame. SlashDot is just as much a Closed Community as AOL and MSN, under the guise of Openess. Don't get me wrong, SlashDot is great, but at the same time, it is a walled community, as is the Open Source Community. Almost like an oxymoron..huh?

Re:Acquired....like SlashDot?

[RedWizzard]

Slashdot is not a portal. It's a news and discussion site. It doesn't try to be everything for everyone which is what a portal is. It's pointless to try and debate Slashdot's open- or closed-ness, it's not relevant, but IMO Slashdot is quite open. The editors exercise fairly loose control over stories and anyone can join and post. How can that be a closed community?

Yahoo links to everything on the web.

Yahoo contains a directory and a web search run by Google. If I want to find something on the web I go directly to Google. I certainly don't expect my news site (Slashdot) to also be my search engine.

It's not like Yahoo's small...

[Moose4]

...ask any of us that were on Egroups mailing lists (seven, for me) and had to go through a half-hour of resetting crap after Yahoo just Borged Egroups last week.

I'll grant that they are better about providing open access to content than AOHell or Disney (and we see how well that's working for Disney, don't we?) or any of the others, but do you think it'd really make that much of a difference if Yahoo got bought out?

Oh yeah...like, uh, I'm guessing, ninth post. Or something.

aoltimewarneryahoo.com

[cpeterso]

whois aoltimewarneryahoo.com

So?

[Kyobu]

That's a pretty nonsensical proposition. The only thing to be gained by buying Yahoo and then making it a walled garden would be the name. And after about 7 minutes, even newbies would realize that if Yahoo doesn't have its index anymore, it's totally pointless. So the only reason AOL or whoever would do that would be to kill the competition, which is stupid, since there are cheaper ways of making money.

If it's portalized, it dies.

[Tackhead]

The only reason people visit Yahoo is because it contains useful links.

If it becomes a "portal", like AltaVista, msn.com, or any of the other "front page" sites, people will stop visiting it, and it will cease to be valuable to those who visit it.

That's not to say YHOO won't be bought out. Merely to say that if YHOO is bought out by some generic media conglomerate, the conglomerate has two choices:

• Leave it as-is, and own its revenue stream, or
• Turn it into a "walled garden", and receive a negative return on their investment as it's abandoned.

Portals are dead. A YHOO buyer who doesn't realize this will just be wasting his shareholders' money.

Fortunately, the world is larger than them

[starseeker]

Such services are great. They are convenient, help us find info faster, and provide services. But if they ever grow too limited or hostile to certain segments of the internet, we are not bound by them. They have no legal claim on the internet. A new service would form, without the limitations. I don't tend to worry about any such company - they can only ever be one component of the internet, and not THE internet. There is no possibility of full control - too many countries, too many people, and too much individuality. Also, the law, while often as much a hinderance as a help, can in some cases prove to be a useful weapon against corporate tatics. Microsoft is being hurt more by the ongoing court case than it ever would be by a breakup of OS and applications. So don't worry, just retain the independant instinct and avoid what you dislike. That's the beauty of internet. There is no one door, and even if AOL trys to become the eight hundred pound monster the way Microsoft has in OS there will always be alternatives. Seek them out and encourage them. Competition is the ultimate weapon and security.

Small and personal?

[kaphka]

Hey, I remember the days when Yahoo was http://akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo, or something close to that. They may be big and corporate and evil now, but you have to give them some credit... they worked their way up.

Well, not a lot to agree with there

[squiggleslash]

I don't know about the rest of Slashdot, but, contrary to the article blurb above, I actually like Yahoo. My Yahoo(tm) is my newspaper in the morning, and the "See if there's something on an intelligent index and if not fall back to Google" makes a great way of searching for stuff. The webbased email, while not original, is damned useful. Sure, there are problems, I'm not overly happy about the fact that Yahoo has an enormous amount of personal information about me, from my name and address to my credit card numbers and sexual tastes (!), but I trust them insofar as I know that if they ever abused that trust with anyone, they'd lose business faster than a fried chicken outlet selling a rat.

More, I'm curious how some of the conclusions/alarmist stuff in the linked to article were drawn. For instance:

A Yahoo merger would have major -- and negative -- impacts on the Internet and Silicon Valley: It would substantially increase the risk that the Internet will be divided into so-called ``walled gardens'' that seek to capture and hold Internet users rather than enabling them to range widely across the World Wide Web.

I don't see the connection. Sure, someone could buy Yahoo with the aim of turning off its indexing and searching features, but what would be the use in that? Yahoo's principle selling point is that of a Portal - of a point to start at on the Internet, and any attempt to corrupt that purpose is going to drive users away.

Mercury Center's argument is much undermined by its own selection of apparent rivals, to whit:

When the AOL service was launched in 1989, the World Wide Web didn't exist. AOL provided subscribers with dial-up connections to its own online network of content and services. Subscribers were free to "chat" with other AOL users. They could browse sections created by companies that signed up to become AOL content providers.

This is very true. Now look at it, a one stop shop (ISP subscription, TCP/IP stack (albeit over a proprietry packet switching protocol), portal and search engine) for Internet access. In other words, why would Yahoo become a 1980's era AOL or CompuServe if AOL has had to become a combination of an ISP and Yahoo-like portal?

Not that I want Yahoo to be bought - it works fine independently and seems somewhat more trustworthy that way. But the linked article is not a good argument against it. Any company that intends to buy Yahoo in order to control what users can and cannot see will have limited success, and will probably die trying.
--

or, what if...

[BDew]

Apple were to be bought by Dell?

RedHat were to be bought by Microsoft?

Slashdot was to be bought by AOLTimeWarner

There are LOTS of possibilities and what ifs.That's why it's called a Free market! This whole thread seems to be one long bit of FUD, IMHO.

It's ok, the internet has survived thus far. Even freeNapster is still alive. And the world appears to be in one piece still, even after the election of W. Sweet dreams, everyone.

We are not in that much danger

[EnVisiCrypt]

The difference here is that among the giants, the small personal internet will always be accessible. Unlike television stations, a website costs very little to run. Even if yahoo were swallowed up by a larger company and turned into a "walled garden", the internet at large wouldn't skip a beat. Sure, it might prevent new users, who aren't familiar with the internet, from seeing the diversity available, but the underground will remain the underground.

And as sites grow popular, it isn't always necessary that they collapse under their own weight, popular sites like blogger have turned to their audience/users for money to buy new servers and the users turned out in droves to pay for a service that they use and enjoy. The power of the internet is that it's a community and the imminent purchase of a large anchor site won't do much to affect the internet that we know and love.

And, not always is it in the best interest of a large corporate entity to subsume their internet properties. The failure of go.com is a powerful example of how corporatization of popular sites can destroy a user-base. And as this happens more and more, you can expect that companies will be more willing to let their affiliate sites be diverse.

Bottom Line: As long as people are passionate about the internet, there will always be independent content. An undercurrent to the mainstream.

customer segmentation says that's a bad idea

[jayfoo2]

How about looking at it this way.

A good percentage of the people have a 'home page' from one of the portals. Mostly AOL, MSN, or Yahoo. Almost everyone uses at least one for some net services (travel, email, news, etc.) And each has about the same market share of web users.

Now why is this. It's because each tries to capture a different market segment. MSN goes for those who don't know how to change their homepage. AOL goes for my mom (lay off the mom jokes please).

Yahoo generally targets the more sophisticated user (no not l33t d00ds with shell accounts). The average user who is interested in content over flash. Yahoo also has a bit more cachet with the 'techno-snob' that says 'I'd never use AOL/Microsuck)

In other words if yahoo (as a 'vibe') became more like the MSN/AOL closed portals it would lose the attribute that makes it most successful. Yahoo as a unit of (AOL, MS, GE, NTT, ABC, 123) would not be a cool as yahoo standalone.

Now just because it's not a good idea doesn't mean it won't happen.

The word is "could", not necessarily "would"...

[drteknikal]

But it is hard to argue against Yahoo! being an attractive acquisition target for any company trying to compete with AOL/TW and MSN. Let's see - of the traditional broadcast networks, NBC is partnered with MS already, ABC is owned by Disney, and CBS is owned by Viacom. This week, Disney is folding GO. CBS has done the most decentralized job, it seems to me. Is Fox even on the radar?

My point is that if you look at MSN and AOL/TW, someone's going to want to compete with them, and Yahoo! is the prime option to bring into the fold.

It may not be an automatic conclusion that a bought-out Yahoo! would become a preferential gatekeeper for those who own it. Though I admit that it is likely, if not probable.

But isn't this just life in the foodchain? Won't another service come along that provides an open view if Yahoo!'s become's closed? And won't they eventually become large enough to get bought when whichever megacorp that buys Yahoo! runs it into the ground and ditches it, like Disney is doing to GO?

mirror, in case whois.userland.com is slashdotted

[cpeterso]

Domain Name: AOLTIMEWARNERYAHOO.COM

Registrant:
America Online, Inc.
22000 AOL Way
Dulles, VA 20166
US

Administrative Contact:
Domain Administration, AOL
America Online, Inc.
22000 AOL Way
Dulles, VA 20166
US
Email. domains@aol.net
Tel. 703 265 4670

Technical Contact:
Domain Administration, AOL
America Online, Inc.
22000 AOL Way
Dulles, VA 20166
US
Email. domains@aol.net
Tel. 703 265 4670

Domain servers:
dns-01.ns.aol.com
152.163.159.232
dns-02.ns.aol.com
205.188.157.232

Yahoo not a Portal? Not for lack of trying!

[fm6]

Portals are dead. A YHOO buyer who doesn't realize this will just be wasting his shareholders' money.

From the point of view of a serious Internet user, portals are certainly a bad idea. But I don't see where they are dead. There have been some nasty failures, such as go.com and Altavista. But these have more to do with a limited marketplace (the official story) and bad management (probably the big factor) than with the viability of the Portal as a business model.

I'm suprised to hear you refer to the Yahoo portalization as something that hasn't happened yet. Portals are about keeping people on the portal, and Yahoo has pursued this goal as strongly as anybody. They bought up, licensed, or developed all kinds of web apps.

This would actually be a good thing. Nobody forces you to stay on a portal site. The problem that Yahoo can't make the pieces fit. In theory, I should be able to use my Yahoo ID to read custom content, send email, maintain an address book, calendar, and other PIM stuff (all synchronized with my PDA), browse the Yellow Pages (and save the results to my address book), find backgammon opponents, play the game itself, etc., etc.

In practice, none of this really works, because the pieces are crudely implemented, poorly supported and documented, and clumsily integrated with each other. And to top it all of, Yahoo imposes the weirdest security practices on its users. For example, I used to get a Medieval History newsletter in my Yahoo mailbox. Because the newsletter used rich text (and thus consisted of a single MIME/HTML attachment), Yahoo changed every instance of "Medieval" to "Medireview" -- just in case the file was a VBS worm in disguise!

In any case, the lost of the Yahoo search engine would be no big deal. I've never seen the point in manual Internet indexes -- they can never keep up. I much prefer spider-based indexes, like Google. And if that's not enough, Google now neatly integrates the DMOZ index, which is really a better Yahoo than Yahoo.

But Yahoo continues to prosper. Why? Because they were there first, and claimed a permanent place in the Web world.

__________________

I'm game.

[TheFlu]

Maybe all the geeks here at Slashdot could chip in and buy it, to ensure that it remains free of the corporate controlled bureaucracy. I'm in for $5.00.

Heck with it, why don't we just start our own Internet company. With the sheer brain power, engineering genius and geekiness of the average Slashdot reader behind the company, we'd be unstoppable. If I were a partner in the company I'd be much more willing to offer up more than just the $5.00 I mentioned above, in fact, I've got about 110 acres of land I'd be willing to donate to the project. 110 acres of pure, opensource geeky goodness. Wow, it'd be a geek paradise.

Of course, if we were to fill 110 acres of property up with geeks, the neighbors (and the garbage collectors) might have a problem with the staggering volume of Mountain Dew cans that we generate. It'd be a mountain of Mountain Dew cans...then again, maybe we could use this to our advantage, and we could open up a year round snowboard park to help pay those ungodly electricity bills.

Oddly enough, I'm only half joking.

Internet vs. Web

[cluening]

"...and the Internet would be that much closer to control by a few large corporations."

You know, I really dislike it when people use the words "internet" and "web" interchangably. I somehow doubt the whole 'net, being that big pile of computers around the world, will be affected by Yahoo merging with somebody else and changing its links. The web, however, could be changed as people's web pages are walled out. Maybe I am just strange at thinking they are very different (seeing as how one is a subset of the other), but calling them the same thing makes me think of people who think that Netscape == The Internet. Rather foolish if you ask me...