It’s hard to tell whether Shoemoney wrote it for the links or whether he really thinks it’s a possibility, but he’s written a rather convincing article comprised of the 10 reasons why Microsoft will acquire Yahoo!.
Whichever reason he has, it’s got plenty of good points. Probably the best one is point 6. The People. Microsoft is by and large a software company and not an internet company. The two are not the same. Yes, both can be said to be software, but there is a large difference between taking 5 years to put out a new version of your software and constantly upgrading and changing fluidly like is required on the internet. Bringing in people from Yahoo that know how to do that could give the live properties an instant boost as well as an impressive portfolio of existing Yahoo properties.
Points 4, 5 and 7(Flickr, Del.icio.us, and Yahoo video) also make the idea rather attractive. But what I don’t see is that points 1,2, and 3 would sweeten the pot. Are Yahoo!’s search properties better than MS’s? Sure. Will the combination of the Yahoo search and MSN search provide competition to Google? I don’t really think so. Financially, the combination of the Yahoo! search market and the MSN search market would be a sound idea. But would it be a sole reason for the acquisition? Not likely.
It’s good linkbait Jeremy. And I do agree that the idea makes some sense, but is it likely to happen in 2007? I’m no oracle, but I don’t think so.
Technorati Tags: microsoft, yahoo, shoemoney, linkbait, yahoo search, msn search, google
About Shane Ede
I’m going to go with the linkbait option. Microsoft culture would never absorb yahoo employees successfully. They’d promptly jump ship taking their fat stock options with them. Microsoft has done fairly well with its internet properties and I can definitely see them leveraging things like the conveniently default on RSS feeds on the Vista desktop as an additional way to push them. Oh you could pretend that users delete/remove things like that but then I could tell you how many hundreds of machines I see a month with the HP quicklaunch spam bar still running after 5 years, don’t even get me started on aol toolbars.
I think there is probably too much of a culture clash — from all accounts they are having a difficult time as is with Ray Ozzie and their live platform. It is difficult to take a culture based upon massive complex software and ask it to make small internet applications. There would also be issues on the advertising system and either Yahoo or Microsoft having to junk the new systems they came up with. It would make sense from the numbers but I’m not sure either would bite or really mix well together.