2006-04-20

Closed for Business: Google, MSN, Yahoo

Today marked yet another phase in my dissociation from closed business models:

I wanted to view someone's photo album on Flickr. However, because this brilliant picture sharing community was recently bought by Yahoo, the service's infrastructure has been progressively overhauled into something that forces users to have a Yahoo passport to logon.

Sounds familiar? Yup, it's the same old tired MSN recipe for shotgun marriage: buy cool service startups one by one and suddenly make them inaccessible to people who refuse to provide oral sex to their whole product line. Not surprisingly, on the same day, I got a similar invitation to view another friend's photo album on My Space, which would have required a similar MSN passport there. Perkele!

Now, which other megacorporation has been quietly adopting trend-setting companies and Free Software projects through the backdoor and progressively forcing people into their own passport model? Hintti: search engine, gay male, gay talk.

User lock-in is not a business model; it is a mentally ill infestation that shall be eradicated.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was pleasantly surprised by the use of perkele and hintti. =D

Terveisin, toni

Anonymous said...

I for one like to have less usernames and passwords. Until Liberty or some similar initiative frutifies, I don’t see how Google, MS and Yahoo! can do without their single sign-on systems.

What I lament is non-MS companies helping enforce the monopoly by using Passport.

Anonymous said...

Well said!