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?

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

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.

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.
--

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