Yahoo buys Overture to secure IP
Oh for the love of…so now Yahoo has decided “Hey, we can’t beat Google, we don’t want to pay licensing fees to them anymore…so what’s next? I know, buy a smaller company which has some obscure patents, and then sue all of the other players out of existence!”. This same tactic has been tried by several other companies, and usually ends up being it’s own death knell as users flock to “the underdog”, and abandon “the champion”.
Anybody besides me remember Compuserve and their attempt to regain control of the .gif format which they had invented, and then chose not to pursue their rights to? Only to years later attempt to sue everyone into complying with their antiquicated intellectual property.
As you can see by the proliferation of Gif’s everywhere on the web…they lost their fight.
Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, DUMB!