As usual in the internet space, nobody can do anything without being torn a new one. Example #1 for the week: Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) making nice. Lord, from the resulting bloggery you would think that Paris had just fallen to the Nazis. Jason Calacanis, founder of Mahalo and a webster guru par excellence, was perhaps the most dramatic, declaring that “Yahoo committed seppuku today,” and going on to say that,
The once proud warrior of the internet space laid down its sword, knelt at the feet of Microsoft and gutted itself today. There was no honor in this death, it was one brought by the shame of losing to Google and a lack of faith in one’s ability to compete in the space they created. To be clear, Yahoo didn’t need to do this deal, Microsoft did. Ultimately Yahoo will look back at this moment as the second — and perhaps fatal –mistake in their epic history.
Now, Jason may be wrong and he may be right. I do know that the coming together of YHOO and MSFT creates a search entity with about 30% market share. You know who has most of the other 70% (GOOG). So you can see a certain rationale to why the two upstart behemoths wanted to do it.
Still and again, you can’t belch in this particular business sector without people yelling at you. And after thinking about it, you know what? I agree with them. I think any attempt to build scale against the Goog is a misconception at best, and a dangerous misstep at worst.
Society is drifting in a very clear direction. We’re moving toward a day when most of our random thoughts, our videos, our music, our pictures of our vacations, graduations and holiday gatherings, our business plans, our poetry and our daily communications with each other — all will be in a gigantic cloud that floats like a giant group mind above and around us. We will be like one gigantic beehive, our collective consciousness gathered for our convenience in one centralized location, the cloud.
Who will own that cloud? You know who (GOOG). I find that comforting, don’t you? Well? Don’t you?