Happy Chinese New Year everyone! Welcome to the year of Rats! May the new year brings prosperity and harmony to everyone. (especially the guys in the picture above :))
As usual, Los Angeles is boring as ever when it comes to Chinese New Year. Even on the Internet, there is hardly a mention of today, which is the biggest celebration for Chinese.
Been itching to blog about this, if not because of that NDA I signed 
Yahoo! Music Unlimited (YMU) is now Rhapsody! I think this is one of the right move that Yahoo! made. We really shouldn’t be in the application business that compete head-to-head with iTunes. There had been several setbacks in this direction, particularly the acquisition of MusicMatch, which app ended up being cannibalized and its users alienated. I am glad we finally got out of this messy and unrewarding business and focus on what we do best. And suffice it to say that we (the Y! Media Player team) have got a lot of work ahead of us to integrate our player with Rhapsody.
You can read more about this announcement here. Seems like the media couldn’t get enough of Yahoo! these days.
I was shocked (though it is not entirely unexpected) by the news this morning about Microsoft proposing to takeover Yahoo! for $31 per share, which comes to $42 billion. I am both ecstatic and a little confused. I am happy that the stock shot up almost 48% today; I have about 1/3 of my money in YHOO (don’t ask why). So it’s a HUGE relief to be able to unload them with some profit. On the other hand, I am worried about the future direction of this company is headed to. Microsoft is not really a favorite among yahoos. We try to get away from their product as much as possible and use open source code. Heck, we have the inventor of PHP working for us! If the deal goes through, what kind of change would Microsoft make?
But I guess for a lowly developer like me, all I really care about is the money it brings to my table. The news article mentioned “…the company [Microsoft] emphasized retention packages will be offered to Yahoo engineers and other key employees”. Great! I am ready to welcome our new Microsoft overlord. Resistance is futile!
William Khoe is a kick-ass Web Developer at Yahoo! specializing in Flex, Javascript, DHTML and CSS.
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