Travis Vocino Experiments in Art, Science & Technology.

As most people in technology business, a couple days ago I woke up to CNBC yelling at me about how Microsoft came out of absolutely nowhere and offered billions of dollars to little ‘ol Yahoo! early that morning.

Even though I updated my iPhone stock ticker to include MSFT and YHOO for the rest of the day (I don’t own either), I really don’t care all that much.

Nostalgia

Sadly, it would be an end of an era. That’s how I see it — purely nostalgic. I’m not Microsoft’s biggest fan — nor Yahoo’s. However, Yahoo has a special place in my heart.

Sara and I often joke about how our hometown is “the internet.” Well, if there was an old school general store in that town it would most certainly be Yahoo.

Magazines and Other Crap

From really awful free email service to magazines that no one I know has ever seen the inside of, this company has created a brand that was once the coolest freaking thing on the internet and is now pretty dull. That can’t possibly come easily.

That takes some serious effort.

Good Stuff

Don’t get me wrong, I like a lot of Yahoo dealings. They have supported the independent web entrepreneurs unlike a Google or Microsoft.

They’ve made some great acquisitions and partnerships with sites I love — del.icio.us, Upcoming.org, Flickr, etc. Sites I used and dug long before Yahoo came along and infused some capital. Not to mention, these sites have shown real improvement over the years. They’ve been given support, esteem and let flourish.

Compare this to FOX News Corp’s MySpace acquisition and the stark contrast becomes significant — Fox having done basically nothing to help the horrible abortion of a service known as MySpace.

Technology Bullshit

I’m not sure how much I love the idea of Microsoft owning that much of the internet services out there though but I do think this acquisition could potentially do some decent things.

Both Yahoo and Microsoft have shown significant internet in building up the infrastructure necessary to push web-based application development. A future where everything is basically done “in the cloud.” Yahoo, on its recent quarterly call, discussed its investments into grid computing.

Obviously the combination of MSN (dog shit) and Yahoo.com (decent) could yield a search service that is on par with a real Google competitor. The fact that MSN search is being pushed at the desktop level on Vista means that if it was actually a decently powerful tool, people might not hate it so much.

From an advertising perspective, the site network this acquisition would create would be very large indeed. An advertiser could essentially target almost every web-based service I use on a daily basis with one buy. That is damn strong. With Microsoft at the helm, I’m skeptical about the execution though.

At any rate, we shall see how it goes. I will pour a sip out for my fallen Yahoo and maybe take a quick peek inside Yahoo! Magazine, just for nostalgia.