Yahoo continues to open the wallet and spend. This time, it’s upcoming.org, the social event calendar service. Andy Baio explains:

Recently, the nostalgia has been replaced by admiration as I’ve watched them making smart decisions, acquiring great companies (Flickr, anyone?), and hiring all of my friends. The end result is that they’re doing some of the most interesting work online, and I found myself linking to them more and more over the last year.

No offense to the parties involved, but I’m not sure this acquisition is on par with Konfabulator and Flickr, but admittedly I don’t know that much about the service. What I do see though is Microsoft sitting in the stands. Again.

Microsoft, where are you? Will Scoble’s recent attempts to pry that wallet from your vice-like clutches be successful or in vain? Vista is still a year away and your competitors continue to spend all around you. Microsoft sucks right now, sorry folks. Lots of nice people over there, sure, but they just suck right now.

Some will read this and think “just another Microsoft basher” but that’s not true. I like Microsoft, I buy their products, I want to buy their stock but honestly do not see the logic in doing so with the way they are running their business currently. Yeah, they have some great things coming.

In the future. Wait, wait, wait. The train is passing by!

I’m starting to think going out with Microsoft is like being on the proverbial cheap date. I’m so glad I own Yahoo stock and not Microsoft stock because I see it going down further before it stops and turns around. When they lose some of the Midas touch and start buying and acquiring more companies, then maybe it will be time to buy their stock.

I do think Microsoft is going to turn it around, but I’m starting to doubt if the Xbox 360 will be the start of it all. Yes, that launch will certainly help, but not enough people buy game systems to seriously impact their stock results. Guys like me that buy every new game system are there, but it’s getting tiring buying systems with mostly sequels for titles. We all know sequels are cash cows for the developers and new, experimental games are a huge risk, but players don’t care about the financial side of gaming, they just want fun games. Nintendo gets this, Sony sometimes gets this.

Yahoo gets taking risks, doesn’t Microsoft? Make a list of risks Microsoft has taken in the last 12 months? Maybe I’ll run a Microsoft Hmm query at this blog and see what kinds of things have been written about from the Microsoft camp in the last 12 months and summarize that below or in a separate post.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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