joannejacobs.net

Jo, if you've tied the success of your business to the business plans of Yahoo or Microsoft, you really need to rethink now. There's a reason the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python) is ubiquitous in web startups: it means you control your own fate.

Think of all the successful web startups in the past decade, from Amazon to Twitter. None of them relied on some other company rolling out products first. While you are waiting for the MS/Yahoo merger to be decided, what are your competitors doing?

It's a completely fair point you raise, Hugh, and I should probably clarify myself. I'm not exactly waiting on the product lineup of Microsoft and Yahoo, but rather the effects the alliance will have on other organisations in the marketplace. It's more a corollary effect than the actual engagements of either Microsoft or Yahoo. Historically these kinds of technology firm alliances have had rather profound effects on the market; the purchase of Skype by eBay didn't doing anything for either auction house technology or indeed improve Skype, but it reduced the interest of venture capitalists in investing in VoIP products and services. The acquisition of Livejournal by SixApart was expected to affect the user interface, overall functionality and appeal of Livejournal, but not much happened either to the LJ interface or its appeal, as investors looked elsewhere, and Facebook effectively killed it in about 6 months (see http://siteanalytics.compete.com/livejournal.com+facebook.com/?metric=uv).

I guess what I'm most interested in for the Microsoft-Yahoo deal is how this is going to change investment patterns in both CMS development and social networking services. It's not so much the applications that Microsoft produces that worry me, but rather the appeal of the applications *we* are building in a changed market. Does that make sense?