inside LG15

I missed writing a post earlier this week because Greg and I have been traveling. We were in Poland for some meetings and then London to check in with the KateModern production team. You’ve already seen some photos from our karaoke extravaganza (um, yeah :).

Things are going great out here and the London team is doing a fantastic job producing KM. In between meetings on Friday, news broke that Microsoft is attempting a “semi-hostile” takeover of Yahoo! by announcing a bid to purchase the public company for $44.6 billion. Wow. The story has been covered all over the internet (here, here, and here) and we won’t know the outcome for awhile since Yahoo!’s board of directors will need to take some time to make a decision. Regardless, everyone’s been having a good time debating about what it means for the internet and for technology in general. So, I figured I’d weigh in on what this means for online entertainment.

Yahoo! has been a major player in the online entertainment industry for awhile and they’ve made several attempts to bring “TV-style” entertainment to the internet. Probably their most successful attempt is “The 9,” a daily internet gossip and news webcast. It’s okay, but I never got hooked the way I did with Rocketboom back in the Amanda Congdon glory days. Could a combined Yahoo!/Microsoft present a serious challenge to online content creators, or would they help facilitate the distribution of even more high quality shows from independent producers? I think it’s probably the latter. Neither Microsoft nor Yahoo! have expertise producing online content, and although Yahoo owns a vast network of content-centric websites, they generally function as an aggregator rather than a producer of original content. Actually, Microsoft has a lot of cool internet technology that combined with Yahoo!’s reach could result in some very cool web applications (Silverlight anybody?).

Hopefully, a combined Yahoo!/Microsoft can prevent Google from taking over the planet… which would be good for everyone. It’s funny, I’ve always been such a Google fanboy, but over the last year I’ve found myself coming to hate Google… crazy. It seems like they’ve done more lately to stifle competition rather than foster innovation. Microsoft is making a play to compete with Google in search advertising, but maybe they can use their organizational expertise to re-structure Yahoo! and enable it to finally integrate and take advantage of all the cool Web 2.0 companies they’ve purchased. I’d like to see the Yahoo! portal function more like a personalized aggregator of content with more integration with Flickr, del.icio.us, and other properties… and don’t forget their minority stake in Facebook. Could Yahoo!/Microsoft actually usher in the Web 3.0 revolution?

In the meantime I’m watching from the sidelines, and for the first time in my life… rooting for Microsoft. How about you?

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 3rd, 2008 at 6:27 pm and is filed under Miles Sez. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.