AZspot: If Yahoo buys Tumblr...
There are bulls and bears. Turns out the bulls are about to pump a billion bucks into this.
Put me in the bear camp. The dirty non secret of the Internet is that the likes of Tumblr slapped together by high school dropouts is low barrier to entry. Anyone can duplicate Tumblr.
And they do! Except it has a brand, and a user base that can’t be replicated. That is, until critical mass moves people off - like with Digg to Reddit or MySpace to Facebook or Flickr to Instagram or Blogspot to Tumblr and blah, blah, blah.
All Mayer wants with this place: cachet, and the dim prospect of retaining it for a while. It’s supposed to be a halo brand for all of Yahoo’s other services. Because quite frankly Yahoo’s biggest problem is that no one cares about it.
Being bought by Yahoo! kills the Tumblr brand by association. They are bad stewards staffed by lazy bureaucrats and their poisonously unambitious corporate culture will sideline Karp within months. Not that he was a good leader, but he was a signal of what Tumblr was. It will be clear what it has become: passe.
The platform will stagnate because adopter types like me will be onto the next gold rush, as of this post. Arguably, that peak of the s curve already came. But this just makes it official.
Source: squashed
