A combined article on two new developments on the tech scene…
Yahoo! Auctions is shutting down, Yahoo! has recently announced. It was done to rationalize its offerings. Yahoo! Shopping will continue to exist. Actually, Yahoo! Auctions is being shut down because Yahoo! has tied up with eBay, and is thus exiting to rationalize the offerings of the two partners. Already, eBay occupies 94% of the online auctions market. Yahoo! Auctions will close down before the end of this month, but will continue to offer some customer service options till the end of this year.
This comes on the heels of Google changing its Froogle offerings’ name to Google Product Search; because Google admitted it was a bad naming decision on their part.
Also, to counter the challenge (is there any?) potentially posed by Google Checkout, Yahoo! has tied up with eBay and its subsidiary PayPal, to make a similar offering. So Yahoo! Search now shows PayPal checkout options. Taking a look around cyberspace, PayPal wins hands-down – in the online market you’re more likely to come across only two methods, credit card and PayPal. Yahoo! has chosen its partners wisely indeed.
Moving on to other news, Microsoft has launched a new service Windows Live Folders at folders.live.com which offers 500 MB with a maximum file size limit of 50 MB. It has different segments of access too – private, restricted (to friends with a Windows Live ID) or public. This is a pretty bold move indeed, in times when Yahoo! Briefcase offers an stone age era 20 MB total storage and no public sharing of content for free users; and when Google’s much-speculated GDrive (which is supposed to have 100 MB of storage) hasn’t arrived yet.
Of course, it’s nothing compared to the likes of Streamload’s Mediamax.com – which offers a whopping 25 GB of free storage – but then when you restrict file access (which you can’t on Mediamax – it’s either private or public), then you want a solution which has a considerable number of users, and at the same time, is from a big provider.
