Microsoft Just Can't Quit Yahoo

itwbennett writes "Back in October, rumors surfaced (and then quickly subsided) that Microsoft was considering another bid to purchase Yahoo. Now the rumors are back, and this time Microsoft is said to be in talks with other prospective buyers about some kind of partnership to acquire the troubled Internet company."

Comments

APPLE should buy them

[unixisc]

Apple is the company that should buy them, and use iOS & Lion to do w/ them what WP7 does w/ Bing and Android does w/ Google. That's the only buyer that makes sense. Otherwise, which Yahoo! services are so valuable to make it worth adding another redundant search engine to the ones they already have? Hotjobs? Yahoo! Groups? Which ones?

Re:APPLE should buy them

[bloodhawk]

I think you are missing the point. The value of someone like Yahoo is not their technology, it is their user base and brand, you can build the tech they have or license it many times cheaper than the cost of buying Yahoo and as apple tightly control their userbase Yahoo becomes a vastly overpriced company for them.

Re:APPLE should buy them

[Sir_Sri]

That would have made sense the last time we went through this. Now that MS and Yahoo are in bed with each other on the search side of things I don't think yahoo has enough value for Apple to want to even consider it.

The other thing is that yahoo would seriously hurt the apple brand. Apple is about new, hip, cool, yahoo is this (by today's standards) old internet company that those of us who had geocities e-mail accounts still use as yahoo accounts. No one in the reality distortion bubble of Apple is going to see acquiring yahoo as a step forward. If yahoo were 1/10th the size and made similar products it might make sense, but on a cheap day yahoo is a 15 billion dollar buyout, and is more like a 20-25 billion buyout to get complete ownership, that's a shitload of money for a huge big outfit and culture that wouldn't really fit with Apple.

MS is a whole other ballgame. Merging yahoo and hotmail would give them a huge base to rival google with, and would bring them into a noticeable share of the search market, and give them a full on portal to the web that they've failed at miserably. All of the things wrong with yahoo for apple apply to MS, but MS has fucked up all of those things enough that buying yahoo might actually look like an improvement over whatever they can manage.

Re:APPLE should buy them

[twistedemotions]

Apple doesn't have spiders crawling the Net or a big index of results already built up.

As far as know, since the Microsoft/Yahoo search deal, Yahoo doesn't have those things either. Microsoft handles that for them. Yahoo Search is now just a front end for Bing.

I suppose Apple could come up with a similar deal with Microsoft for iSearch. It's Yahoo's variety of other properties and brands that have the value now.

Re:APPLE should buy them

[afabbro]

There is some logic in what you say. However, if I was on Apple's board, I'd be worried about tying up a ton of management time, energy, and focus. If you buy Yahoo, you buy big headaches - morale, layoffs, merging cultures, skeletons in the closet, hundreds of decisions about what to do with different properties (virtual and physical), many new vendor relationships, new legal relationships/issues, etc.

And it wouldn't be a small purchase - we're still talking billions. Yes, Apple could afford it, but by size I mean king-sized issues. This isn't like buying some small startup with interesting tech where you roll into into yourself and six months later it's no longer part of your day-to-day worry. Buying a company the size of Yahoo will take X% of your management talent for a year or two.

The questions are (a) how big is X, and (b) is what you get for that X% worth the headache and (more importantly) the opportunity cost.

Re:APPLE should buy them

[DerekLyons]

Otherwise, which Yahoo! services are so valuable to make it worth adding another redundant search engine to the ones they already have? Hotjobs? Yahoo! Groups? Which ones?

Yahoo! Groups are widely used, as is Yahoo! mail. It's finance pages are widely used as well.
 
But one of the real jewels in their crown, and one most people don't associate with Yahoo - is Flickr. There's a huge community there, and it's not only one of the most powerful and fully featured photosharing sites... There's an extensive community of discussion boards as well. (These are nearly unique among the major photosharing sites AFAIK.)

Re:Yahoo has value, just not all that much

[Baloroth]

The service itself isn't what is valuable. The name and user-base is.