I added Techcrunch because it was an easy way to keep up with the industry while I wasn’t directly immersed in it – namely while I was finishing up school in St. Louis.
I’m removing it because I’ve come to conclude that a lot of the articles are really really bad.
The straw to break the camel’s back was Arrington’s coverage of the events surrounding Yahoo! over the past few months. It has gotten incrementally worse. Yes, Yahoo! is in a tough spot. However, some of the attacks he has levied at the management and the decisions made by the company are just laughable. His recent post, an attempt to analyze the market impact of Microsoft walking away from the table, just sounds bitter. He talks about how outsourcing to Google will cause people to leave the Y! ad platform, giving Google an effective monopoly on the ad mkt.
However, let’s consider the alternative: Google vs Microsoft. Two massive players. Apparently Michael missed the lectures on duopoly and oligopoly during his years as an economics major. The more players remain in the game the better. He is correct to note that this will likely lead to Google market gains, likely at the expense of Yahoo!, but I still maintain that Yahoo! remaining a semi-independent player at least buys time before it’s just an all out duopoly.
Another writer for Techcrunch reports in the very next article posted that the minimum requirement for how much Google makes from the deal is very low. Thus Yahoo! can take its time in serving up Google results. This is nowhere near the disaster Arrington describes it as. Though a microsoft buyout would be good for the shareholders in the short term, it would be much worse for the market.
The other reason I’m leaving is because I have found a better alternative: http://news.ycombinator.com, ironically discovered in a TechCrunch article written by Arrington, provides a much better way to keep tabs, as well as lots of articles that are actually USEFUL to me as a developer. The important TC stories make it on there anyway.