Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote:
In my view there isn't anything that Flickr is doing which Commons couldn't be doing. And as much as I have faith in the Flickr team, I have doubts about whether Yahoo is the right place, long term, for the world to be relying on for such resources.
Who'd be better? Some site like woophy.com that can't even manage to bring in $800 a month to pay for it's servers? Panoramio, because it's got a rich (for now) sugar daddy? How about some academic institution that gets a grant to start something, but not to finish it?
The whole point of Flickr is that people can do things with it without talking to the Flickr staff. You should try working in the "enterprise software" world where you can spend weeks and weeks of the time of 20 people on both sides of the table trying to make a sale, only to have the buyer decide that it's going to put off the decision for another year. Then you leave the meeting, go back to do some productive (you think) coding and find that instead you've got to talk to people on the phone for six hours to renew the license of some software you're using.
I don't think that things are, objectively, bad at Yahoo as people think. YHOO is in the black financially; people put it down because their user base is going sideways, and not growing explosively like Facebook. It looks bad when you compare it to two rivals: Google, which has done much better in search and monetizing search and Facebook, which has pioneered the "social network" revolution that makes portals like Yahoo look quaint. That said, Yahoo has a number of world-leading properties such as Yahoo Finance and Flickr.
Now, Yahoo might one day get acquired, maybe even broken apart, but it's just as possible that Microsoft or Google will be on the rocks 10 years from now too.