Some time ago, Yahoo! bought Flickr.  When it did so, Yahoo! initially “encouraged” Flickr users to sign up through Yahoo!’s traditional login.  Immediately, the venerable Flickr community cried outrage, Yahoo! balked.  After that, Yahoo! softened its style.  When it bought Del.icio.us, it made almost no changes.  The idea was: “we’ve changed, we’re not going to impose our style on companies we acquire.”

Of course, Del.icio.us’ founder is now sitting in a cubicle somewhere within Yahoo!’s HQ.  But I think he wanted that, seriously…

Anyway, the irony of it all is that when IGN Entertainment acquired my old company, their VPs would talk a lot about how they would not - like Yahoo! - come in, slap purple plaint on the walls, change the company name to Yahoo! once the deal closed… Yahoo! no longer does that, especially after the Flickr community reaction.

But… sit down for this folks: many people today wonder why Yahoo! did not encourage Flickr to develop a similar service akin to their picture/photo/image file sharing service for video.

Who is right?  Who is wrong?

All I know, as much as Google should lay off YouTube and let it develop and grow… the fact remains, Google should point to (and then some…) opportunities that YouTube should look at.  After all, Google itself - those Gods of innovation - technically were late to the video party, so much so that they had to fork out $1.65 billion to acquire a company that was launched in the Spring of 2005!

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