So yesterday
(e:jim) emails me to say the SL economy has crashed
.
Then, I woke up this morning to find that someone had returned all my property form Slate. My hometown in Secondlife. I was so mad that it was gone and then I thought, wait - thats my land how did they banish my stuff from it?
Then I logged in and saw - someone seriously paid 200,000L/$700 US dollars for my remaining tiny plot of land. I can't believe it. It has had the price tag of $700 for months, maybe even a year and everyone always tried to bargain down. I refused to budge on the price thinking I would rather own the land then sell it for cheaper. Then this morning I wake up and bam. I get an email saying my shit has been returned to me by the owner of the land.
I know the secondlife economy crashed yesterday. But its still worth $700 US. This means I have made almost $2000 off this game I never even play. Should I cash out or re-invest in the long term. I think I might just cash out. I figure if I ever want back in I could just buy some land.
You have sold L$209530 for a total of US$732.59 using LindeX. Your Second Life account will be credited the net proceeds.
One benefit for us, as programmers, is that Microsoft would finally employ people who get the web. I'm hoping the thousands of web designers and developers that would become Microsoft employees would kick the ass of the IE team.
MS cares more about intranets then the internet and maybe that'll change. Then again the music and product divisions of Sony have been at each others throats for years, so maybe the web people at Yahoocrosoft would just end up similarly locked down.
It's hard to see what this will bring either party. If Yahoo hasn't been able to realize success (in terms of market perception - no denying they are successful in many ways) through their vision of the web, they're not going to do any better being dragged down by Microsoft's need to protect its cash cows - Windows and Office.
I see a chimera forming that is going to take years to straighten out and make fit well. This is Microsoft's one chance to buy their way back into paid search, and it seems like a pretty risky thing. All the press release talks about is synergy. And we know how well that goes... AOL/Time Warner.
Microsoft's new MSN Live Yahoo Personalized Home Page Search! (TM)
It's going to be a weird day when yahoo.com redirects to live.com.
If this goes through I will finish my cup of google kool-aid (I've already started drinking it) and switch my yahoo mail/calendar account to gmail. Microsoft has frustrated me too much.
Someday we'll drive our Microsoft to the Microsoft to get more Microsoft.
Too early to call...
HotMail was bought for $400M ; this is 110x bigger than that. There is no way that Microsoft will insist on converting our hundreds of thousands of servers to Windows; they might as well just put that $44B in a pile and light it.
(e:paul) , Semel wasn't doing anything anyways, so his departure doesn't mean much.
Interesting times ahead... :-)
Great. Microsoft is going to own Flickr now.
What I don't get is how the technology will be merged. It took MS like 3 or 4 years to migrate Hotmail off Unix to MS servers. How many decades is it going to take to transition Yahoo from PHP to .NET/C#? Yuck. Microsoft will end up choking on that one.