Dynamic Flash

It seems that Yahoo! have decided to emply some ethically questionable techniques to wrestle back some of their market share from the mighty G. The carrot here is “advanced Internet phone calling”. The stick is a whole heap of unrelated tools that get installed if you’re not not paying enough attention.

This event has caused me to revisit the Flash Player + Yahoo! Toolbar “offer” debacle. In light of recent events, I am now more concerned than ever that Macromedia have chosen to ally themselves with such a company. In fact, it concerns me that Macromedia are employing similar tactics to get people to download the Yahoo! Toolbar when all they really want is the Flash Player. The following is a quote from Terrell Karlsten, spokeswoman for Yahoo!:

By setting it that way we’re giving people choices. For people who want to download software in one fell swoop, they have that option. If they don’t want it we give them the ability to customise it.

This sounds unnervingly similar to David Mendels’ response to an earlier post of mine on this offer:

What we are doing is leveraging our website, and making an optional offer to the trivially small percent of folks who choose to install the Flash Player that way.

I’m not naive enough to think that my opinion is going to cause a major US company to back out of a lucrative deal. The Developer Relations guys certainly made it clear in their responses that this is a done deal. However, it would appear that Yahoo’s reputation is in serious decline, and this will inevitable rub off on their business partners, Macromedia included.

I just hope that the Adobe merger goes ahead. Maybe then Macromedia can forget about short term financial concerns and kiss good-bye to the ridiculous Yahoo! deal.