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.