How Yahoo Weaponized My Work - Software Patents

[Michael Butash]

I thought this was an interesting article today about the yahoo trolling 
now:

http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/14/yammer-ceo-says-he-wont-hire-anyone-from-yahoo-who-doesnt-quit-in-next-60-days/

As I see it, Yahoo has made themselves irrelevant today, letting any 
social aspect of it fall stale or disrepair to wither on the vine.  I 
was floored to hear the CEO left PayPal for Yahoo, because really, what 
is yahoo ever going to amount to again with or without him?  Hearing he 
got paid 27mil makes sense, as it would take nothing but purely gross 
amounts of cash would make me do it.  Seems like a death knell to his 
career so, maybe he was planning his retirement.

The fact that Scott couldn't find any better way to bleed cash from a 
rock than patent trolling the modern upstarts says blatantly they have 
no more tricks up their sleeves.  Now they've kicked off a patent war 
amongst their own inner circle of dotcom'ers, more or less like mobsters 
ratting each other out in the most distasteful of ways.  While I take 
pleasure in seeing facebook attacked, I find patent trolling about the 
worst thing that businesses can do toward one another.  All made 
possibly by a horribly inept government system that has outlived its 
usefulness too.

I really can't say who I want to lose more here, but as a whole, 
internet businesses lose a lot more due to this pettiness.  Just roll 
over and die already instead, your time is behind you Yahoo.

-mb


On 03/15/2012 11:57 AM, Derek Trotter wrote:
> I agree with what you said about yahoo. I don't like the idea of people
> being able to patent a concept. Let people have rights to software they
> write, but not the idea itself. If the software patent idea had come out
> a few years earlier, someone could have gotten a patent for encoding
> digital audio in a compressed form. This would have been a headache for
> the people who developed mp3 and the other formats that have come after it.
>
> On 3/15/2012 9:17, Michael Butash wrote:
>> I was chatting with folks at PayPal when they told me their CEO Scott
>> Thompson was poached by yahoo to be the next inline to try and
>> resurrect them to relevancy. I found that odd until I heard he got
>> 27mil to do it. I'd probably even sell my soul to microsoft for that.
>>
>> I'd wondered just what he would try, as it seems pretty dismal for
>> yahoo these days (but hey, even lycos is still around!). Pretty sad
>> that patent trolling is the best he could come up with, indicating
>> it'll be yet another revolving door CEO position there if he fails, or
>> worse, he's successful as little more than a parasite on the industry
>> already plagued with them. That's a hell of a legacy from "made paypal
>> big and strong".
>>
>> Way to innovate there buddy. Though I dislike Facebook, I almost hope
>> they win just to force yahoo die off once and for all.
>>
>> -mb
>>
>>
>> On 03/15/2012 07:51 AM, keith smith wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/03/opinion-baio-yahoo-patent-lie/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29
>>>
>>> <http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/03/opinion-baio-yahoo-patent-lie/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29>
>>>
>>>
>>> ------------------------
>>> Keith Smith
>>>
>>>
>>>
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