Quantum Forest

After reading the news on Microsoft’s offer for Yahoo (a ‘few’ billion dollars) I was thinking not about what Microsoft would get out for that deal — I don’t care much about industry speculations — but what is in it for me as a user/consumer. The short answer is nothing.

I use only two Yahoo services: flickr and delicious. However, I do not make use of the ‘social‘ features. I do not keep track of who is using the same tags or comment on other people’s pictures or expect comments on mine. I use delicious so I can have a central repository for bookmarks: I do not need tags if I have access to decent search. Any, and I really mean any, service that will let me keep bookmarks, find them and import the ones I have is good enough.

I am not sure why I use flickr. At some point I thought about sharing my pictures (but it is irrelevant now), then I thought backup (but I only keep a low resolution version of the photos) so the only use I have for it is to geolocate the photos. That, and putting some of them in this blog (or in Tren de Carga). However, as many people living outside the USA know, flickr’s mapping feature is very poor in other parts of the world. Thus, I would happily switch to any other service that would let me geolocate photos in a better way. I have tried Zooomr and Panoramio but I am not convinced by their convenience yet.

I am not claiming to be a representative user, but from my point of view there is no reason to be loyal to any of these services. In the case of the former, there is no hurry on moving out, but there are already acceptable options. In the case of the latter, I am keen on finding a service to keep some of my photos geographically organised, particularly now that I want to prepare a new set of lectures.

Coming back to the start of this post, unless there are some big changes coming from a successful deal between Yahoo and Microsoft, from an enduser view point the effect will be no change of value. No change of value, no big news.