When Yahoo acquired Flickr, I had to give up my cool login and use my not-so-cool Yahoo! credentials, which had been created with the concept of professionalism in mind. As if that wasn't bad enough, Yahoo dumped their own photo sharing services in favor of Flickr's. Because my free Flickr account had pretty much all it could hold, I opted to let the photos on Yahoo disappear with the service and hope they were elsewhere, since I never saw any easy way of getting them all, and since deleting enough Flickr photos, many of which are linked in my blog articles, wasn't an option I was comfortable with exploring. Certainly, my camera-phone efforts weren't worth a paid Flickr account, though it would have given me a lot more storage.
Now, my tech news feeds inform me that Microsoft is proposing buying Yahoo, and I've got to wonder what new problems "opportunities," as they say in my workplace, this would provide. It could be painless (for those of us who aren't employed by either enterprise): as I understand it, the decisions Yahoo made were related to reducing the amount of resources required to support and maintain their systems; perhaps I'm being a bit naive, but I'm thinking Microsoft could do the resource allocation bit without raising a figurative eyebrow. I haven't forgotten, however, that Microsoft is a business, and that businesses, whether small, large, or merely of galactic proportions, are always concerned about the bottom line.
I'll be waiting to see how this measures on the PITA scale at the tail end end of this.
Update 11:17 pm: Naturally, I'm not the only one (or the first one) to wonder what we end-users stand to lose from such an interesting
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