Like wildfire, the news that Yahoo! has purchased Tumblr for $1.1 billion has been spreading around the internet all morning.
I should make it clear that I don't have much personal investment in this news, for a few reasons:
- The only Yahoo! product I use or care about is Flickr.
- I'm not a Tumblr user.
- I'm only subscribed to maybe two or three Tumblr blogs.
But there are still a couple of interesting tidbits in Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer's announcement (if you skip the lame gif at the top). The second sentence in her post is "We promise not to screw it up." This is a surprising bit of candor, and shows an actute awareness of how the public perceives her company these days. It's quite refreshing to see from a CEO, really.
That sentence is shortly followed by the fact that Tumblr will be allowed to run independently and retain their own CEO. Rather than interfere with the way Tumblr operates, they're willing to stay out of the way and let Tumblr do their own thing. I think this is the right way to go.
Unfortunately, her post then delves into a bunch of buzzwords and numbers, which is distasteful in my view but whatever.
Time will tell if Yahoo! screws this one up, but honestly I just hope they don't get too distracted from making improvements to Flickr. To me, that's their real killer product and always has been.
