Just because open source is winning in the enterprise, that doesn’t mean that the proprietary folks have given up their old tricks.
Roblimo’s Hideaway
Do you think the operating system and software on your little laptop is important? It is to you, but when it comes to big business, what’s going on in the cloud is what counts, even though it’s invisible to most people.
Robin “Roblimo” Miller is a freelance writer and former editor-in-chief at Open Source Technology Group, the company that owned SourceForge, freshmeat, Linux.com, NewsForge, ThinkGeek and Slashdot, and until recently served as a video editor at Slashdot. Now he’s mostly retired, but still works part-time as an editorial consultant for Grid Dynamics, and (obviously) writes for FOSS Force.
The value it once had as the main intersection on the Internet is long gone, despite the fact that the site still commands enough traffic to make it the fifth most visited site on the web. The trouble is, that traffic isn’t arriving through the front door anymore, and visitors aren’t sticking around for more than a minute or two. People no longer visit the site to use all of the nifty features Yahoo once offered, because the majority of those features are long gone. Instead, these days Yahoo’s users come through the back door, either to use Yahoo Mail or to read a news article — usually a reprint from another site — after being directed to the URL by Google.