Who Will Own “Where”?
Posted by Sebastien on the 2008/02/04 at 07:54
in Amazon, Flickr, Funding & Transactions, Google, Local, Local Search, Microsoft, Product Search, Tim O'Reilly, Yahoo! -
Most of my business readings this weekend have been various analysis of the potential Yahoo/Microsoft deal. Unfortunately, I haven’t been impressed by the level of the debate as many of the comments were all about “Microsoft is evil” and its corollary “Google is not”. I was hoping for more level-headed reflections but I think the involvement of Microsoft in the story created a highly-emotional environment in the tech blogosphere.
One of them stood out for me. Tim O’Reilly looked at the big picture and tries to extract some industry meaning, showing once again his crystal ball is one of the most polished in the industry. Talking about industry consolidation in general and Yahoo in particular, he offered:
The web companies that have a chance of surviving as independent entities are those th