Reading about the hostile take-over late last night and early this morning, my first thought was how this would affect Flickr. My oldest remaining Flickr photo was uploaded June, 2004, a long time ago. The other Yahoo properties that I use, I am not that attached to - I could find other methods or replacements. I do like the link-dump service of del.icio.us, for instance, but if it went away tomorrow, I'd figure out a way to replace the functionality. Same with my Yahoo mail, I mostly use it for spam anyway.
A small but vocal minority on Flickr are already staging cyber-protests at the prospect of a Microsoft takeover of Flickr's owner, Yahoo. Flickr is one of several popular Web 2.0 sites owned by Yahoo that loyal users fear will suffer under Microsoft ownership.
[snip]
Microsoft has focused on back-end and enterprise companies like devBiz or DesktopStandard, while Yahoo and Google are more adept at scooping up choice consumer startups like YouTube, MyBlogLog or Feedburner.
Microsoft’s approach to online communities strike many Flickr users as being directly at odds with Flickr’s ethos. Yahoo’s efforts to embrace the latest online standards — like OpenID, a single login mechanism, which was recently added to all Flickr accounts — might not succeed under Microsoft.
Yahoo declined to comment for this story.
Flickr user Xenolon addresses many users’ fears, saying, “Microsoft is not a customer oriented company, they’re an enterprise company.” [From Flickr Rebellion Brews at Specter of MS Acquisition]
Flickr has been part of my daily web journey since Flickr offered free Pro accounts if one signed up enough friends. I did, and got a Pro account, and was hooked. Microsoft's main skill set seems to be to suck the fun out of anything they unleash their software engineers upon. I'm not a Microsoft hater, I have Office Vx installed on all of our Macs, I use Excel daily, and even use Map Point sometimes (using XP in Parallels). However, I hope John Gruber is correct, and Microsoft sells Flickr off. I have a sneaking suspicion that Microsoft would leverage Flickr photos through Corbis, or similar, and start reselling my photos. Or else, Flickr might just cease to be fun, and I'd have 2 hours of my day back.
