on july 19th, 2006, i posted my first blog post from california. i moved there to start a new job at yahoo! ~3.5 years later, it was time to go, and so at this point, i am officially a non-Yahoo!
what’s next? i don’t know yet, but i am both excited and optimistic about the future. insha’Allah khair. maybe it’s not a bad time to give a startup a shot…
woot! word has it that monday, yahoo will write a “sorry” to microsoft. now let’s just hope they don’t get rid of our search advertising (and, therefore, search in general) to google… as i mentioned before, the best option here is to tough it out this period of time, and things will come back up.
in lolcat terms, courtesy of the flickr anti-microsoft group: this picture is awesome 
yahooza linked two funny articles about the whole y! ordeal… i especially like the first one, and the second one is funny too but has bad language, so if it offends you, consider yourself warned:
on a more serious note on the same subject, the techcrunch article, “decision time for yahoo,” is a more serious (and perhaps realistic) analysis of the situation. until i read this article, i never really knew that there could be lawsuits for violation of fiduciary duty (which basically entails that you look out for your shareholders before looking at your own interests).
if it weren’t for this, i would have to think that yahoo’s decision would be easy – be patient and the storm will pass.
so there’s a bunch of speculation about y! being bought out by microsoft. while i have no idea what will end up happening, i think that at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter.
when you’re low enough in the food chain (a “peon,” in warcraft2 terminology, part of the work force), you wake up in the morning and mutter, “ready to work,” and go and do whatever they tell you to do. then at the end of the day, you get your check. whether that check is from y! or microsoft, does it really matter? not really…
that having been said, i’d choose to develop under linux/bsd using open source technologies over windows development any day.
i guess since it’s already been made public on techcrunch, i can post about this here… but yes, y! answers development is moving to europe. we already had some developers there, but now it will be driven entirely out of europe.
as for the us developers, we were all moved onto another project. while this is a change that i personally welcome (it’s nice to have something new to work on every once in a while, esp if you’re currently in a lull with what you are doing), it is kind of sad because answers was sort of like a child to many of the developers. although i wasn’t there from the very beginning of its initiation, i was there early enough and for long enough to feel this way.
in other y! news, i found this to be great. it’s about time
my name was mentioned on the messenger blog in this post – check it out.
muslim nobel prize winner, muhammad yunus, was the target of one of yahoo’s advertising campaign’s for answers – i am happy to have a question of his on the site