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Oil Traders May Be the Only Ones Who Want Yahoo to Survive

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Re: Oil Traders May Be the Only Ones Who Want Yahoo to Survive

#91
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you forgot they are running a multi trillion dollar industry on free-as-in-beer software. I doubt they would pay $5 per user. or even a year flat fee. and since they will not pay, you will have to run it on ads. And supporting online/mobile offerings (that do not have their requirement of local client/local logs) will always give you more money. it is a lose/lose situation.

> you forgot they are running a multi trillion dollar industry on free-as-in-beer software. Isn't that the basis of enterprise linux?

There's a big difference between relying on a self-hosted product vs. a remote-hosted one. If your self-hosted software is suddenly no longer available, you have plenty of time to come up with a migration strategy, while you continue to use the obsolete product. If Yahoo Messenger went away, it would immediately disrupt business for all who rely on it.

Not to mention that any enterprise Linux user worth their salt has an expensive support contract with a major vendor (such as Red Hat). Either that, or they're confident that they have the in-house resources to support it. No enterprise user considers Linux to be "free as in beer", by any stretch of the imagination; rather, they're using it because it's the right tool for the job.

Re: Oil Traders May Be the Only Ones Who Want Yahoo to Survive

#92
post #37

This is insane. Why does guy who digs a hole and sell's oil need to care about high tech?!

Chevron operates one of the world's largest Hadoop clusters.

http://hadoopilluminated.com/hadoop_illuminated/Hadoop_Use_C... a link for the unbelievers

Re: Oil Traders May Be the Only Ones Who Want Yahoo to Survive

#96

Sounds like an opportunity for someone to buy yahoo messenger, make it work the way the oil industry wants it, and sell it to them as an industry specific chat service. No need to bring the rest of Yahoo along for the ride.

It already works the way the oil industry wants - free, and no annoying sales people, contracts, authentication issues to deal with.

A buyer that tried to "sell it to them as an industry specific chat service" would destroy it in the process.

Re: Oil Traders May Be the Only Ones Who Want Yahoo to Survive

#97

Sounds like an opportunity for someone to buy yahoo messenger, make it work the way the oil industry wants it, and sell it to them as an industry specific chat service. No need to bring the rest of Yahoo along for the ride.

It already works the way the oil industry wants - free, and no annoying sales people, contracts, authentication issues to deal with. A buyer that tried to "sell it to them as an industry specific chat service" would destroy it in the process.

If no-one is prepared to pay for it, it's probably going to get destroyed at some point anyway.

If something is absolutely critical to the running of your business, then at some point you need to at least consider paying for it.

Re: Oil Traders May Be the Only Ones Who Want Yahoo to Survive

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It already works the way the oil industry wants - free, and no annoying sales people, contracts, authentication issues to deal with. A buyer that tried to "sell it to them as an industry specific chat service" would destroy it in the process.

If no-one is prepared to pay for it, it's probably going to get destroyed at some point anyway. If something is absolutely critical to the running of your business, then at some point you need to at least consider paying for it.

What it needs is probably a no-profit consortium dedicated to maintenance, with small fees. Industry members could then be peer-pressured into compliance. It would become a badge of honour, marketing expense etc etc.

Re: Oil Traders May Be the Only Ones Who Want Yahoo to Survive

#99

Why didn't Yahoo focus on further developing businesses around these services (Finance, Fantasy etc.) that people love?

All these niches need real focus. Yahoo! was built on a generalist/populist bent, which is why they initially succeeded but also why they found so hard to keep up: you simply can't be the right thing for everyone all the time, but there is also a real risk in taking your products apart. How would you manage a migration from open-to-all YMessenger to industry-specific YCommodityTradingMessenger...? You would basically have to double your maintenance costs in the short run, duplicating a lot of code, guarantee interoperability... it's a lot of work, and none of this would get the mainstream exposure Y management always craved.

Re: Oil Traders May Be the Only Ones Who Want Yahoo to Survive

#100
post #15

This is insane. Why does guy who digs a hole and sell's oil need to care about high tech?!

Oil industry is extremely high-tech.

High tech but often as cheap as stallholders. I did tech support for one big firm at some point, and their IT was shockingly old. I asked why and was told that's how you shave profits in lean years -- which is fair enough. When you've been around as long as these guys have been, your priorities probably don't include "being fashionably high-tech".
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