Yahoo! to become social platform
On 5th April, Steve Ballmer sent a letter to the Yahoo! board giving it three weeks to strike a deal or possibly face a proxy battle, in which Microsoft would appeal to Yahoo! shareholders to get rid of the current board and replace it with one that approves the take-over.
Those three weeks are over and, as yet, neither Microsoft nor Yahoo! has made a move.
Well, that’s not entirely true. At the Web 2.0 Expo conference in San Francisco on Friday, Yahoo! CTO Ari Balogh announced the ‘Yahoo! Open Strategy,’ a system to open up its web platform and allow anyone to develop applications to run across its many sites.
The move posts a clear cultural divide between Yahoo! and would-be purchaser Microsoft which, despite its many protestations to the contrary, would still rather keep control over its code. The clear overlap with Google’s Open Social is bound to further displease Microsoft.
On the other hand, Yahoo!’s 500 million monthly users dwarf MySpace’s 110 million and Facebook’s 60 million. Once the company resolves vital issues of privacy and user control over how much they share, Yahoo!’s wide range of well-known brands and services could make it the world’s largest social network.
Now that’s something Microsoft wouldn’t mind getting its hands on, but what’s it going to do about it? Watch this space…
