Dendreon Corp fka DNDNQ

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Why Yahoo changed? (OT)

First, hi everyone.

<Good point, Dew, on why Yahoo changed formats. Only something like what you said could possibly make sense. Yahoo finance is the top finance spot on the web BECAUSE of the message boards (and the ability to track your portfolio), so their decision to make the boards less useful is going to result in a mass exodus>

But this makes little sense. The cost of server irons has come down quite a bit nowaday. The CPU and memory cost is not insignificant for Yahoo but the true cost in running their systems is storage and software for information management and mining. That would not change in this move. If you need another data point, look at Google who use a farm of cheap PCs to serve pages in real time worldwide. Fairly simple distributed algorithms take care of dividing search indices across many machines connected via highspeed links. There are no central big irons with high-cost memory etc. as the old IBM mainframes or Sun servers.

If Yahoo knowingly cut their revenue to save computing cost, then they deserve to go out of business. IMO, their change is first an ill-calculated move to increase click rates and second, perhaps a wannabe slashdot.org or google.