Business Bricks

Last week I was asked for my favourite website. It changes pretty often, but I said del.icio.us (a bookmark sharing site). Turns out Yahoo just bought it.

Dave Pell says: “Yahoo is buying tools, buying cool, buying the future and perhaps most important, buying teams.” Jason Kottke says: “There’s an interesting story in here somewhere about how Yahoo is hiring/buying the “alpha geeks” (hackers, tinkerers, accidental entrepreneurs) and Google seemingly isn’t (Ph.Ds, computer scientists) and what effect that could have on each company’s development.” It seems like Yahoo’s acquisition strategy might be to buy in teams that can change Yahoo, rather than to buy in teams to convert to the Yahoo way. i.e. takeunders not takeovers.