Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft/Yahoo! Merger a Good Idea?
NorbMan writes "Last month there was speculation about Microsoft's interest in joining forces with Yahoo! to battle Google. Today, a Merrill Lynch analyst recommended a Yahoo! takeover by Microsoft. From the article: "A Yahoo/MSN-Microsoft combination would have garnered approximately 41% share in the US of search queries [in April] versus Google with 44%.""
Very bad idea. No one will trust their business to a company called 'Microhoo!'.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Can anyone say antitrust?
:wq
Theoretically, the combined user-base would surpass Google. But many users like me, never visit MSN / Yahoo after acquiring a Google identity (gmail).
The combined HPaq is still below Dell, although prior to the merger, the combn. was much bigger.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Somehow, I think that the moment yahoo joins (msn eats it up) with microsoft, mysteriously half the 41% will move to google or another different engine.
Is not numbers we are talking here, is not even efficiency. IT's TRUST.
Face it, there's really no way around google yahoo or msn.
Have you tried finding a good alternative to any of them?
Most smaller engines are powered by either yahoo or gooogle.
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
Microsoft has already been convicted of monopoly activity and yet somehow people keep talking merger.
Yep that's it _, we want to allow more centralization of market power.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
This monopoly of commercial operating systems for personal computers, and monopoly of commercial word processors for personal computers, is proving somewhat a millstone round the neck of Microsoft. Are they about to sell off these businesses so that they can move on ? Games consoles, search services, etc.
I expect if the price was right, IBM would take Windows and/or Word off their hands. It's only money.
Ok, these 'market analysts' look at spreadsheets of market shares, etc. Look at the technology under the hood: Microsoft uses all Windows products. Yahoo uses BSD and PHP as their environment. I'm sure Gates and company would LOVE to be running such a large, critical portion of their business on OSS! Or throw all Yahoo's code away and re-write in .NET? Right!! From a platform point of view, anybody who thinks about this for more than 30 seconds will see that this is a non-starter. Nothing here. Move along.
What's better than having the trust and reliability of Microsoft paired with the strategy and insight of Yahoo!
Oh...
First, Google's capitalization is higher than Yahoo's (they are more expensive).
Second, remember when AOL bought Netscape? Something like 40% of their workforce quit the next day. If MS buys Google, the google brain trust (which is were all the value is) hits the door immediately.
Probably because of two reasons - Google is a a company that afaik writes everything in python, on linux boxes. Their search runs on a linux cluster - something microsoft wont beable to compete with any time soon. Also, it probably wont be allowed by the american equiv of the monopolies and mergers commission
They'd have 41% for about 10 seconds until users began migrating. There's no way Yahoo could fit comfortably into the MS spectrum of products. The real stickiness for Yahoo isn't search, it's webmail and the other services that get people using it as a portal. They search at Yahoo because its already loaded up in their browser. None of those services are something that MS wants to maintain -- there's way too much friction with MS's existing products. So they either kill it all off or force users toward Live et al, which is not what those users wanted, not the least reason being MS has a negative reputation in this space.
Poisoning all of Yahoo's services doesn't gain you any marketshare in search. Maybe a few percent as collateral damage, but nothing like what's being predicted here.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
Does anybody use Yahoo for more than just searching? What about their excellent portal, My Yahoo!? It's the one place I always start from to get my daily and intra-daily doses of news, including slashdot. It's great for tracking stocks. It's highly customizable.
What happens when Microsoft gets its hands on Yahoo? How long before this great site stops working properly on anything but IE? Can people just switch to Google and find this kind of service? Does anybody do this anywhere near as well as Yahoo?
Technologies used are irrelevant, from a business point of view (don't flame that) - it's all about market share. Google are running away with the search market - and with it, the future of advertising. New entrants have no chance, so the only competition is going to come from the existing players getting their act together. Both yahoo and MS have embedded user bases which will erode unless they can get to a par with google. If this means rewriting some code base, or MS having to rely on oss for a while, so be it. If they don't rapidly tackle google, they'll lose a lot of $$ in the medium term, and lose their business in the long term. Of course - one day the US Govt could break google up (Bell style) but they've never done that with MS, so MS really do have to win the web war to survive and at the moment they're being pulped by google. Yahoo may offer a shortcut to victory (or at least a more even fight).
Why is it assumed that all the people that currently use yahoo will instantly start using the new MSN search? You can't buy search marketshare. It don't work like that.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Google is a a company that afaik writes everything in python, on linux boxes.
Hardly. Remember the story just a couple of days ago about which operating system and browser different companies' employees use? Google employees mostly use Windows! (Insert huge disclaimer about the unreliability of these stats here). Most of Google's software is aimed at Windows users. Native Linux support often comes much later.
As for writing 'everything in Python'? Python is a great language but I doubt if all that much of their code is written Python. A lot of their work is C/C++/Java/Javascript/Ajax/etc...
I know that on the Python homepage it says:
"Python has been an important part of Google since the beginning, and remains so as the system grows and evolves. "
-- Peter Norvig, Google
I would actually be interested to know what products (if any) they have that are powered mostly or entirely by Python. Does anyone know?
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Instead of two large companies to worry about we only have to fear one even larger company.
So, would their first task after merger be to port Yahoo's massive infrastructure over to .NET? It sure would look bad if they kept Yahoo's BSD-based services. Yahoo also has enough integration issues of its own - for example, combining Yahoo Photos with flickr, Yahoo MyWeb with del.icio.us , etc - bringing another bundle of technology into the mix would just completely bog developers down and allow Google to run further ahead. Plus, there is immense resistance to that sort of change - note the outrage a while back when Yahoo bought up various services like eGroups, and planned to merge them with the Yahoo Clubs. People didn't want their Club turning into a Group (despite the fact that the Groups was a better service). Announcing that your Yahoo Group will become a MSN Group (powered by Yahoo) isn't going to go down well.
Also, perhaps combining the two services wouldn't result in the combined marketshare? I use the search.yahoo.com interface on occasions to get a second opinion to go with Google - surely various other people use various sites in this way. If you turn two sets of results into one, you get one slice of this pie, instead of two. And will the shiny new merged services have every single feature the two previous ones did? I think not, as the most likely course of action will be "throw the worse technology away, add a few features to the better one, and call it a merger". So, you'll lose everyone relying on features X, Y, and Z who now have no reason to use your service.
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
Being able to make a good search engine is a skill that only a select few posess. They guys at Yahoo aren't bad. If something like a hostile takeover or merger occurs, how many of them are going to resign within a matter of weeks? I'd venture to say "a lot". People don't like it when established company atmosphere is changed all of a sudden. If Microsoft were to gobble up Yahoo, of course they'd law down a bunch of changes and piss off the best techies. When that happens, Microsoft will have pretty much paid a couple of billion dollars to buy "*.yahoo.com". It's a valuable domain name, but not that valueable.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
This assumes that the merger doesn't cause users to run away. Consider both Yahoo's and MS's recent efforts to revamp their website: both caused drops is marketshare.
The only company gaining serious traction in search is Ask.
Smart money says pay for a little guy with upward mobility. If MS were smart (and it isn't) they'd go after Ask. Merrill Lynch is just brainlessly applying old merger principles to new economies. It's not helpful.
In the computer business, smart money is on growth, not marketshare.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
Yeah, Google creeps me out, too.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Is there a search engine available at MSN or Yahoo?!?!
The only motive to do this for microsoft is to make its own monopoly position stronger. Mergeing with yahoo would result in a stronger position versus google, makeing the possebility for elimenating google even greater. Remember: microsoft does NOT really need yahoo (it's already got MSN). Microsoft only needs yahoo when it wants to elimenate google.
Why would Microsoft want to elimenate google? Well, for starters: it's a big, high profile, highly visible company... which just happens to support Open Source Software, and that includes... Linux (do you ppl remember Microsoft declaring 'war' on Linux?).
If this merger is allowed to continue, we might not have a big, high profile, highly visible google in a few years... and that would be very convenient to Microsoft.
seen the tactit assumption that the markets parts add up to the new total. This assumption is made too often. However, if the parts are inherently a misfit, the total too often is much less than the sum of the parts.
It seems this advice was given in desperation, since the goal should be to enhance the whole. That is, just becoming bigger does not assure retention of markets. Moreover, misfits can destroy existing value. Despite the currently available cash horde at Microsoft's disposal if these units do not mesh to create greater value than their independent parts the premium paid is not worth the price.
If this action is taken, at least, no matter how bad the executive decisions are it is unlikely to destroy MS immediately as Borland did to itself when it bulked up to fight MS. Borland simply did not recognize the value of some of the pieces that could have generated positive cash flow despite not being premier products.
The technology under the hood is totally irrelevant from a business profitability point of view. Hotmail did not run on Windows at first either. Over time, Microsoft ported it over. ... It might take five years, but who cares?
I can smell the money burning when I hear stupid shit like that. The arrogance is stunning. Have you seen the contradiction in your thinking from the above parsing yet?
Who cares? The customer cares, you idiots! They are not going to hang around for five years worth of buggy service. That's Microsoft, though, their precious marketing image is always more important to them than actual service or .... the customer. Yahoo appropriately stands for "You Always Have Other Options."
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I dunno, that's a lot of evil to concentrate into one place.
Re. the naming: Back when IBM-acquiring-Apple rumors used to circulate back in the 80's, the joke was this: What do you call the merger between IBM and Apple? IBM.
Would Dracula merging with Frankenstein's Monster to take out, uh, Buffy, be a good idea? No, you'd just get an even uglier monster (especially compared to the sexy Goog- uh, Buffy) with a combination of skills that would seem to plug the others' holes (eg, Dracula's shapeshifting plus FM's zombieness) but really just leave it trying to focus on too many things at once (Blood? Electricity? Love?!). Plus as any geek knows, Buffy always wins.
2. I'm not necessarily sold on Ask. I just suspect that for return on value, you'd get more out of ask than you would Yahoo, because Yahoo appears to have extended their brand as far as possible.
3. If anything, I'd offer the argument that MS should get out of the search business altogether. Focus on what you do well, and trim experiments that fail. I think we'll all agree that MSN/Live is never going to overtake Google, and will probably never overtake Yahoo.
4. On the subject of overtaking competitors... Whether you like XBox or not, MS clearly made a mark in a market where many people didn't think MS would last through its first generation (at least not by anything except brute force). By the time Sony is done going bankrupt and pissing every electronics consumer in the world off, MS stands a legitimate change of being the #1 console gaming system manufacturer in the world.
It's been my experience that strong upside, which is what MS would need from any merger/buy, is not found in solid and stable enterprises like Yahoo.
The question is, does MS want to become Pepsi to Google's Coke? If so, then Yahoo is a good investment.
If not, MS needs to absorb a brand with upside (such as Ask), rethink its entire approach with MSN to generate some upside (unlikely, since MSN is now the ugly pig), or get the hell out of search altogether.
I'd also offer that if "buying marketshare" is your view of Ask and MS, then the two might in fact make an ideal pairing, since they think alike.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.