Five Years of Delicious Tagging
Delicious really brought social bookmarking and tagging to the mainstream, so I honestly wish its fifth birthday came under better circumstances. I still remember when it went by the adorably geeky name del.icio.us. I still remember smiling when founder Joshua Schachter quit his day job to pursue his crazy little project full time. I still remember cheering when Schachter’s entrepreneurial gamble paid off, when Yahoo bought Delicious.
In the three years since Yahoo acquired it, Delicious has seen its founder sidelined, its brand diluted, its mindshare diminished, and its design dumbed down.
Hell, Yahoo Buzz competes with Delicious. It’s peanut butter all over again. Click here to continue reading “Five Years of Delicious Tagging”…
Microsoft to Yahoo: Not Interested
Things are starting to look really, really sad for Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang. First, Google leaves him at the altar of their search advertising deal, rendering him without a mighty groom to fend off a Microsoft takeover.
Next, he suddenly changes his mind in favor of a Microsoft takeover, denying everything he fought for through most of the year.
Now, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer puts another nail in the coffin of Yang’s Christmas.
Speaking at a Committee for Economic Development of Australia lunch in Sydney on Friday, Ballmer said: “Look, we made an offer, we made another offer. It was clear that Yahoo didn’t want to sell the business to us, and we moved on.”
Ballmer said other deals with Yahoo had also been unsuccessful. “We tried at one point to do a partnership around search, not advertising. That didn’t work either, so we moved on, and they moved on.”
“We are not interested in going back and re-looking at an acquisition,” he said. “I don’t know why they would be either, frankly.”
When discussing the failed takeover, which if successful would have been one of the biggest takeovers in IT history, Ballmer said “they turned us down at $33 a share, move on.”
What’s worse than throwing away your dignity as founder of the world’s second largest Internet giant? Having it thrown back at you by the twenty-fourth employee of the third largest Internet giant.
