Microsoft Alums Create Flickr Competitor in the Photo Sharing Space
The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Microsoft alums picture photo sharing made easy The Seattle Business Times is reporting that a group of former high-ranking Microsoft executives have emerged from retirement to build an online photo sharing site.
Context & Ripple Effects
Per the Seattle Times report of February 7, 2006, several former high-ranking Microsoft executives have come out of retirement to build an online photo sharing site aimed squarely at Flickr — a confirmed market entry, though the founders' identities and product details were not disclosed at announcement.
The timing matters: it lands just as Microsoft itself is pushing deeper into consumer services, with the Windows OneCare Live subscription antivirus launch planned before summer and aggressive pricing posture toward security rivals reported the day before, plus IE7 beta work adding feed reading to the browser. Alums founding consumer web startups puts them in competition both with Yahoo's Flickr and, indirectly, with their former employer's broadening consumer ambitions.
First-order effects
- Flickr gains a competitor founded by operators with deep consumer-software and distribution experience, raising the bar for execution in easy-to-use photo sharing.
- The unnamed startup must convert its founders' Microsoft pedigrees into early users against an incumbent that already owns the enthusiast-photographer mindshare.
Second-order effects
- Yahoo is pushed to keep differentiating Flickr beyond storage — features like sharing workflow and ease of use become the competitive surface rather than raw capacity.
- Seattle-area engineering talent with Microsoft backgrounds becomes a recruiting battleground, as ex-Microsoft founders staff up close to home.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Microsoft functions as a talent incubator for the consumer web: senior veterans cycling out of Redmond into startups compounds competition for the company it trained them in.
The trend: Senior Microsoft alumni are becoming founders in consumer web services, turning Redmond's executive bench into a feeder system for startups attacking markets like photo sharing.