Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Going After Yahoo! Again
Corrupt writes "Microsoft on Monday released a letter that supports investor activist Carl Icahn's efforts to unseat Yahoo's board, as well as confirming its interest to explore a bid to buy the entire company, or just its search assets, with a new board."
Yahoo bought Altavista and AllTheWeb years ago.
All those former well known web search services are just brands for Yahoo search.
btw. Bablefish is just a brand name around the underlying third party software "Systran".
My favourite operating system is ReactOS; binary compatible to WinNT series
Actually, Yahoo did innovate still: they introduced Yahoo Groups - preceeding Google. Then there's Yahoo Finance, which is one of the most comprehensive and popular resources on corporate investments. More Yahoo services inroduced after Mail:
Yahoo Answers.
Flicker
Babelfish - ok, not their innovation at all, and not really all that of an innovation anyway, but it's still the best translator on the WWW.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
IIRC, most of the eyeballs came from eGroups, which they bought and merged into Yahoo Groups. (and eGroups itself was a merger of eGroups and OneList.)
When Yahoo! took over, the groups gradually became less useful; the worst was interstitial ads, which would show up every once in a while when you clicked on a message. Given that the search function could only search N messages at a time, this made groups fairly useless. You'd try to search for a phrase, see "0 matches in messages 13000-14000", click "Next" to try to continue the search in 12000-13000, and get an ad instead. Luckily, around the same time, Google Groups was launched, and anyone who wanted a usable mailing list moved there.
Often amusing, but I can't say I've ever seen an insightful answer there. Asking Yahoo Answers is like asking a group of teenagers at the park.
Again: Bought, not innovated.
I think Yahoo's biggest innovation was their shopping system. Long before amazon.com expanded to be a generic shopping cart, you could search Yahoo, easily find the product you wanted, and use your stored shipping/billing info to buy it with a few clicks. Sadly, after a few years, they screwed up search, drove merchants away with fees, and quickly became useless.
It's a share-seller with enough money and the resources to make stupid as hell moves to try to bolster the "investment" he made for maximum return when he cashes out.
Oh, boo-hoo, he "lost" how much on his investment (Never mind that he's not in the red on the whole thing in the first place- it's my understanding that he's still showing deep black ink on that purchase of his...could be wrong there, but I don't really have much sympathy for the man's "plight" here if that is still the case...)- never mind that they're under NO obligations to consider unsolicited buyout bids, friendly or hostile- and doing all this stupid crap is actually harming his "investment" more than the declining the MS offer did.
Yahoo Answers
Not particularly innovative. A multitude of similar services existed before Yahoo answers.
i.e. Google Answers, Experts Exchange, in the late 1990s
FAQFarm circa 2002 (WikiAnswers since 2006).
Taking the idea of other sites and scaling them up is not really much innovation.