the art of the brand

Does it matter to you whether Microsoft owns Yahoo! or not?

A while back i commented on the irrelevancy of taking brand loyalty sides in Microsoft vs Apple.
Now that Yahoo! has temporarily rejected the opportunity to be eaten, it’s time to review the future.
Yahoo! was once a dominating force on the internet (full disclosure, I am often asked to be a beta tester, and was one of the original 7000 Yahoo! id’s, and havce spent untold hours there doing one thing or another).
Back in those neolithic times when people made fire by banging obsolete 5 1/4 floppies together,
Yahoo! did things like “beta test” the i-chat plug in, then drop it after they had reverse engineered it into Yahoo! chat.
Then the java guys staqrted arriving in greater and greater numbers, imho led by the …duh…Java Consortium, which has always seemed to have a thing against MSFT, unless they wanted to play with them for a few minutes.
In the meantime, MSFT dragged the world–not the geek world–the whole world– into 1975, whether it wanted to go or not, carrying along bloatware, legacy issues, and endless security holes, just like a plane load of aboriginals arriving at an airport with their goats, firewood, and animist cultures.
The real issues has been, since one celled creature times, that Gates felt that software was 1/2 the box, that creating software was a profession, that professionals get paid.
On the other side was the “open source” community which says, aiming a  gun at its own head “as long as i havce a day job playing with this stuff everything should be free.”
Over at Yahoo, several bux were recently spent on a facelift, which sux. doesn’t quite suck major pond water, but definitely sux. Examples? mozilla, on almost alternate days, can;t get there, or does just barely. Firefox works great, and watching my meters, sux and leaks more memory than i.e.3.02 could have dreamt of while doing it.
It is no doubt based on some very open sourcy concepts, very cute and flash-like. Very pale blue, and web2. Very much a tribute to the visual acuity of 25 yoa designers.
Historically, Yahoo! was late tio the party several times–it was the dominant me-too player, with tonnes and metric tonnes of cash behind it.
I hear frequent complaints about MSFT not understanding the internet. I hear frequent complaints about MSFT being a predator.
I also heard Apple recently try to claim that nobody reads books anymore.
The reality of the evolutionary pressure is that increasingly real power–capital–is in the hands of people aiming at open source, or giving away source, making it increasingly easy to hire labor at increasingly lower prices.
And the only pressure being offered in return is to hypothesise more and more bling in the hopes that capitakl will be attracted to it, with proprietary adaptations that let somebody get a service worker job. It’s laying there hidden in the GNU, waiting for the slow mammals to find as the last of the dinosaurs eat them.