Loosening my coupling with Yahoo (excuse my SOA-speak)

For those of you who still have my @yahoo.com personal email in your address book, now is a good time to replace it with the more portable one composed of my first name @vambenepe.com. This way there won’t be any problem when I move away from Yahoo (which is where my personal emails are currently redirected) after the Microsoft acquisition.

This is not a knee-jerk anti-Microsoft reaction. It’s just an intuition that their attempt to acquire Yahoo is driven more by lust for Yahoo’s audience than anything else (Tim Bray seems to agree). And that having acquired the audience, Microsoft is going to want something more for its $44.6 billions (or whatever the final price ends up being) than the few dollars I send to Yahoo every year for freedom from ads and a few additional services. Things like promoting Silverlight for example (did you hear that the Web broadcast of the 2008 Olympics will supposedly require Silverlight? Since I don’t own a TV, that would make me a little upset if I cared about the Olympics).

When the time comes (I am willing to give Yahoo-Microsoft a chance to prove me wrong), I’ll probably just move to my own server unless I find a provider who offers a great email-and-only-email service. It won’t be GMail.

In the meantime, whether this acquisition succeeds or not, thank you for updating your address books.