Retirement Wishes to Google, Yahoo, & Microsoft

Perhaps its the hot hazy lazy days of summer that have some companies feeling as though it’s time to put a few things out to pasture. I’d dedicating this post to recent retirees from the big three.

1. Google AdSense Referrals, to be retired in August. The program that allowed publishers to make $$ by referring Google products will be shut down in August and reports will be removed by late October. In response, Google is pushing users towards the newly launched DoubleClick Performics Affiliate program. However, the ability to advertise Google products has been put on hold.
2. Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool: retired in the UK in 2007 and recently retired in the US in late June. Since it’s launch, there have been numerous reported issues with the tool and Search Engine Roundtable has conveniently documented many of them for us. The most egregious being that with the change in Sponsored Search and the launch of Panama, the tool seems to have had less uptime than downtime over the past year. Adios Keyword Suggestion … or is it just more downtime?
3. Bill Gates has retired and they’ve already redirected his bio page from the Microsoft corporate website.
4. Windows XP is being phased out more aggressively. On June 30th, Microsoft stopped selling XP to PC-makers and retailers. Analysts have been speculating for several months about Microsoft’s lagging Vista operating system sales and some have even foretold of it’s collapse. I’m clutching my XP Pro install disk as we speak.

Happy retirement!

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