Yahoo! Buys Konfabulator

The other big news today is that Yahoo! bought Konfabulator. Part of the deal is that Konfabulator will now be free, with refunds for those who paid the $19.95 registration fee in the last few months. The idea behind this seems to be that Yahoo! has lots of content available and this is another way that they can expose users/customers/clients to that content. I won’t be surprised then if Konfabulator finds its way onto the SBC/Yahoo! DSL install CD. It may even become an install option on the Yahoo! toolbar.

In the long term I’m not really sure where this will go. Mac OS X already has a similar feature with Dashboard (at least for 10.4.x). There is certainly still plenty of time for Microsoft at the same thing to Windows Longhorn Vista before it gets released. I suspect that if Konfabulator becomes any sort of success for Yahoo! on the Windows desktop then Microsoft will squish if for no other reason than it can and in the process instantly convert people from reading Yahoo! content to MSN content.

Let others create the market and train users, just to have Microsoft come in and squish the competition like a bug. Sound familiar?