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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...
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.
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.
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.
Instead of two large companies to worry about we only have to fear one even larger company.
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.
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.
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.