Yahoo! Buys Flickr

I honestly had no idea that Yahoo! was interested in buying Flickr. I’m not entirely surprised though. It’s the business model that was born out of the Internet bubble of the 80’s. Almost.

At any rate, the folks at Ludicorp announced that Yahoo! has bought them up.

Yahoo actually does acquire Flickr

Holy smokes, SOMEBODY out there is bad at keeping secrets!! Yes! We can finally confirm that Yahoo has made a definitive agreement to acquire Flickr and us, Ludicorp. Smack the tattlers and pop the champagne corks!

Woohoo! What does this mean? It means that we’ll no longer have to draw straws to see who gets paid, schedule conjugal visits between trips to the colo….wait! That’s not what you want to know.

Reading their entry about the buyout is the best way to find out what this really means to Flickr and Yahoo! users. My quick summary of that explanation is nothing.

This type of buyout started with the Dot Com era. Companies would start up just to be bought out. You’d get a bunch of people together with a cool idea, develop it just enough to get noticed by a company such as Microsoft, then wait until they try to buy you out. It didn’t matter if actually had a working implementation. You just needed a cool idea and enough done to make it look like you had a product.

This has changed. Companies have wised up. They want working product. Now the idea is to make a cool product. You don’t really need a long term profitability plan. Just sustain yourself long enough for a company with deep pockets, a sugar daddy if you will, to want your product. Let them figure out a way to make money off it.

Also new is the fact that buying companies don’t want to replace the original staff or even try to integrate them into their existing corporate culture. There’s two reasons. One, those being bought out don’t want to abandon their project. They have a stake in it. Companies like this because those individuals want to keep it going. Two, these people had an idea that the existing culture didn’t yield. Stifling that creative drive is counter productive. This way, the company isn’t just buying an idea or a product, they’re getting that for free while buying talent. It’s more about the staff of those projects than the projects themselves.

It’s certainly an interesting paradigm. I’d like to take advantage of it, but I lack both a great idea and the balls to drop everything and gamble on its success.