SOURCE: Forbes.com
This is all kinds of scary. Yahoo are obsessed with acquisitions of sites that execute services better as a way of getting you to use their product. The death sentence that was handed to Flickr through Yahoo’s integration is a prime example of how fast things can go a-wry in a simple business move.
It’s hard to fault David Karp if that number is really true though. A guy that never finished high school to making a billion dollar business deal is difficult to root against but I do hope that he holds up to his word when he discussed the possibility of a buyout in Forbes’ December issue as mentioned in the above source article.
He didn’t want to get “absorbed into a behemoth of another company and raided for talent and traffic.” But he also mentioned being open to “acquisitions that leave the company alone….There are a lot of paths for us.”
Yahoo’s integration strategy is rarely a case of attempting to get their established audience to use their new product, rather the reverse, ill-fated attempts at trying to push their current services on the existing users of a new acquisition.
is this the beginning of the end?
