Microsoft-Yahoo: My Opinion and Yours
Every once in awhile. a rumor festers for so long that it's startling when it turns into reality--as the idea of Microsoft buying Yahoo has now become. The behemoth of Redmond has launched an unsolicited $44.6 billion takeover attempt of the venerable Web portal--here's its press release, including a letter from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to the Yahoo board. The obvious motive behind the move: to compete more effectively with Google. the company that is becoming the Microsoft of the Web age.
Yahoo has yet to be heard from, and the whole thing could fall apart, but it's not too early to ask ourselves whether this would be a positive development for consumers. And my instinct is to say there's no obvious good news here.
For one thing, Microsoft has been forced into this shopping spree in part because it hasn't been very successful--relatively speaking--at figuring out how to appeal to consumers on the Web. With certain exceptions--we like Popfly--most of its services are me-too latecomers rather than best in their categories. The Windows Live initiative seems to consist of releasing not-very-exciting services with confusing names. And Microsoft keeps not doing things you'd hope they would do, such as figure out a coherent way to bring Microsoft Office into the browser in some fashion.
Yahoo may get beat up a lot, and it's certainly struggled to compete with Google. But it's done a much better job than Microsoft of reinventing old services such as Yahoo Mail to take advantage of an evolving Web. It's made smart acquisitions, such as Flickr, Delicious, and Zimbra. And even things it does that aren't particularly successful are often interesting (see Yahoo 360, for instance).
Microsoft's announcement says that it would keep lots of smart Yahoo employees, but for now, you gotta think that it's more likely that Microsoft's bad habits would rub off on Yahoo than that the infusion of Yahoo brainpower would solve everything that's been lacking in Microsoft's approach to the Web.
It's also hard to imagine how the dozens (hundreds?) of overlapping services offered by the two companies could be melded in anything like a coherent fashion. Would both Yahoo Mail and Hotmail survive? Maybe but they wouldn't both have big development teams working to make them better. Could you use your current Yahoo login to sign into Microsoft Office Live? Possibly, possibly not. What would happen to all that competing content, such as Yahoo Tech and MSN Tech & Gadgets--both of which, full disclosure, include PC World material? Who knows? (I shudder to think about the branding that's likely to come out of this. Microsoft Yahoo Mail? MSN Flickr? Yahoo Live?)
Microsoft obviously wants a better shot of getting a bigger slice of the Web advertising pie which Google is cheerfully gorging on these days. The merger might give the company that opportunity. And as much as I like much of what Google does, I also like the idea of it facing strong competition--which, since both Microsoft and Yahoo are kinda challenged online, it doesn't really have right now.
But when I think back over thirty years of Microsoft history, and almost as many years of it acquiring other companies, there's not much reason to believe that the Web would be a better place for you and me if it owned Yahoo. So I'll be relieved if this merger, like the 1994 Microsoft buyout of Intuit, turns out to a great big deal that amounts to absolutely nothing.
Stay tuned for more coverage from PC World as events warrant. Meanwhile, what's your take?
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The proposed offer extended by the Microsoft Corporation to purchase Yahoo inc. for an amount of $44.6 billion is going to be a real threat for all the world. Countries and communities alike.
With Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo inc. worldwide all states and personal informations will be put to risk. The current use of the internet, where every country and every individual is putting information on the net, these informations will no more be a private and a personal thing at the personal level and even more devastating at the state level.
If the octopus tentacles of Microsoft are not smashed now tomorrow Microsoft will know who has the money and where, what is of utmost confidentiality and to access it.
A LINE HAS TO DRAWN RIGHT NOW RIGHT AWAY
Microsoft cannot own Yahoo inc. the World won't let it happen and the US Government will stop it too.
If MS would dump most of their current services and staff and replace it with yahoo, then maybe. But it will never happen. Bye bye *BSD and php, hello windows and asp and the rest of the half-a**ed crap they will use, just to prove that it can be done. MS will gain traffic, for a while, but i think they will run yahoo into the ground and drive users to google, or some as yet unknown service. Are you SURE this isn't googles idea?!?
Both google and now it seems (new) msn live do a really weird thing, which google has confirmed is a bug... they index (capture) ads on web pages which later show in search results as links when you do a search. It seems with all the hoopla and everything else google is doing that this either hasn't been noticed or isn't considered relevant.
I first discovered this as a participant in google's adwords and adsense program when doing searches for our websites and seeing the results. It's been happening on google for some time and now on msn (recent upgrade?) It seems this 'bug' would effect relevance ranking. MSN live isn't as obvious as google and requires a "bracketed" search of our site to uncover the idexed ads.
I think it was in early 2006 when google made major changes, dumping millions of web pages for a 'better' relevancy system that it has today. Because of what google and msn live are doing, for me for now yahoo is my default search.
Another problem is what going to happen to the other isp that have contract with yahoo. Att(Sbc) Yahoo, Verizon Yahoo and maybe other isp. I just hope they do not get rid of yahoo answers. I do not want to use wiki answers, not designed correctly.
Competition will always surprise us. Re - derugulation of the telecoms industry - "The sky is falling!" Many said. And forget about personal privacy- there already isn't any worth its salt! Let the market decide ...
what now will yahoo be even more buggy with microsoft in control as microsoft is well know for pushing it's products and software out way to early and getting the average users to work for free to help fix them up and show them where the mistakes are
i guess it is time to stop using yahoo now
when will they start yahoo genuine advantage lol
I think that Yahoo! is a basket case. I think that when Microsoft gets a good look "under the hood", the wheels will come off.
Yahoo! spends a lot of energy and money on freebies like most of Yahoo!Mail, Yahoo Groups, and, my favorite, MyYahoo! which I use for RSS feeds.
I am delighted at the Microsoft offer which let me get out of Yahoo! stock with a triple. If the deal goes through, I will probably dump Microsoft.
I thought this was about MS buying Yahoo, not Google! Personally, I don't give a crap whether MS buys Google. I know I'm in the minority but I don't Google and you can't make me! lol..
I was horrified to hear that MS was a serious contender to buy Yahoo. I have used Yahoo for over 10 years and would be lost without it. Now, if in purchasing Yahoo, MS would leave behind their lesser products (ie hotmail, messenger, etc.) and put MS?s pocketbook behind Yahoo products in order to be more competitive with Google, I?m all for that. But we all know MS would simply assimilate Yahoo into MS?s machinations and Yahoo would cease to exist. (See Star Trek?s Cyborgs)