04.09.10
Gemini version available ♊︎More of Microsoft Sought to Manage Yahoo! (Coup D’état)
Summary: Blake Irving, a former Microsoft executive, may be moving into Yahoo! and no lessons are learned from past cases of Microsoft entryism
Microsoft’s hijack of Yahoo! carries on, based on fairly simple observations. Yahoo! is just becoming like a department of Microsoft over time and we have given many examples of staff that moves from Microsoft into Yahoo! (executive staff, not just developers).
The latest example of this disturbing trend is the potential addition of Blake Irving from Microsoft (his exit was mention here) to Yahoo’s top chairs. “While it is unclear if Irving has agreed to take the job, sources said Yahoo (YHOO) management was keen on him working there,” says Kara Swisher, who also writes:
According to numerous sources, Yahoo has been seriously courting former Microsoft exec Blake Irving to take over as one of its key execs, running its product organization and essentially becoming the Internet “visionary” many think the company lacks.
Comes vs Microsoft court exhibits such as this one teach us about Irving’s involvement in the very dark side of Microsoft. This example is from the Corel saga. It is a company that Microsoft took over through staff/direction. Yahoo’s CTO is now leaving, which only validates this observation that Microsoft is taking over Yahoo! from the inside and putting inside Yahoo! some of its own moles, including Icahn and then Bartz.
“Google’s dominance is not a healthy one, but considering what Microsoft does, it’s a lot healthier than the alternative.”To Microsoft, this fight for presence in search (Microsoft heavily doctors its search results for self promotion) is a case of pushing hard with a poor product, all as part of an attempt to use PR for self-fulfilling prophecies. Microsoft’s partner comScore [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10] is among those who help this prophecy, but to be fair, Apple does that too, especially with hypePad [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10] (it is Apple’s latest case of using a media blitz to pretend that there is high demand, which in turn it hopes will generate sales to fulfill the delusion).
Anyway, we humbly applaud Canonical for deciding to dump Yahoo!/Microsoft and the corresponding Slashdot post (which links to this post) seems equally positive about it. Google’s dominance is not a healthy one, but considering what Microsoft does, it’s a lot healthier than the alternative. █