[geeks] Flicker users u in arms over MS acquisition...

[Phil Stracchino]

James Fogg wrote:
> I worked for Vicinity when it was consumed by Microsoft. They had big
> promises, big plans and said they wanted to do right by Vicinity
> customers. In the end they forced VCNT customers to adopt the vastly
> inferior MS geolocation API (MSN Maps, essentially) and pissed off the
> customers who then went to Mapquest.
> 
> They also immediately killed our public free interface (MapBlast), which
> got as much traffic as MapQuest back in the day.

So *that's* what happened to MapBlast ...

> MS wanted only one thing, one less competitor. They couldn't give away
> their geolocation services (literally), so they bought ours and burned
> it down. I've been inside the machine and from what I've seen I don't
> expect Yahoo will fair any better.
> 
> MS is simply pure evil.

Microsoft wants to be the sole supplier of computer software worldwide. 
  End of story.


-- 
   Phil Stracchino, CDK#2         ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
   Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
   alaric at caerllewys.net            alaric at metrocast.net
           It's not the years, it's the mileage.