Yahoo's Continues to Shop
I hope Yahoo's M&A folks work on commission given the flurry of the deals in recent months. The latest purchase is Pixoria, which has developed an application called Konfabulator that lets people run desktop “widgets” such as traffic reports and mosquito levels in your region (really!). While Pixoria is a smal, three-person start-up, its purchase must be viewed from a higher strategic level because it suggests the race to control the New Desktop is intensifying. Look at the desktop search applications rolled out by Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and AOL as the most obvious shot across the bow. Somewhere in the mix, RSS is going to play a major role on the desktop as computer users seek quicker access to news and information. Yahoo made an intriguing move into this market with acquisition of Blo.gs. There is a race taking place for control of the personal computer and the New Desktop beyond the OS. While the moves so far have not been big in size, they are significant strategically. It will be interesting to see what Google does next as far as blogs and RSS. As an aside, the lack of noise surrounding Google's home page beta has been curious.
