The Microsoft-Yahoo Deal and Photos

Well two days ago, in light of the woes coming from Yahoo's earnings conference call,

This morning it looks like Microsoft has offered a $44.6 billion buyout offer for Yahoo! -- which makes all the sense in the world for so many reasons. I'm not going to get into all of those reasons, just read With Flickr under his control, Microsoft could use Flickr as an onramp to Snap Village allowing better traction to move the top amateur photos being taken today into the "for sale" category.

If this happened this would represent a serious threat to Getty's current dominance in the stock photography business.

5. on a job posting that Microsoft was looking to hire an exec to run a team to create a photo/video sharing site to compete with Flickr. I'd guess that Mike and his team would go to work for the Flickr team or elsewhere within Microsoft if they didn't want to work with photos anymore.

6. Microsoft could use the audience at Flickr, perhaps the largest audience of photo hobbyists in the world, to help promote HD View research. HD View is emerging technology being worked on at Microsoft that allows impressive panoramas to be created by stitching photos together. By combining mapping and geotagging, Microsoft could look to create new ways for collaboration to take place by merging Flickr photos together. This technology is still a bit of a ways off, but controlling the largest library of organized, tagged, and especially geotagged imagery on the internet, Microsoft could potentially do some pretty interesting things with these photos.

Interestingly enough, Stanford Professor Marc Levoy showed technology similar to this first hand when we visited him down at Stanford last fall.