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Posted by Richard Ziade on February 1, 2008, 11:11AMHide The Children : Microsoft Set To Acquire Yahoo!
Based on the big blob of write-ups at the ol' Techmeme, tech bloggers are all abuzz about Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Yahoo! My guess is the acquisition will happen. Some thoughts:
- Is this really all about ads and search? I'm guessing that's a big part of the story. So I'm left asking - is Microsoft's value heading to the Web, or is Yahoo's value headed to the desktop? Or both?
- Redundancy anyone? Who survives:
- Windows Live Photo Gallery vs. Flickr
- Windows Live Favorites vs. Delicious.
- The list goes on: maps? chat? shopping?
- Related to the last point, how does a Flickr or Delicious culture survive a Microsoft-ification?
- An operating system has acquired a suite of web services in many respects. I'd expect Google and Apple to continue to draw closer.
- What of all the great developer support Yahoo!'s contributed over the years? Does that get swallowed by the big MSDN monster?
So how big of a Web presence will MS+Yahoo be? Add the red and green lines and subtract some for "overlap tax":
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Comments
Well, Google should start bucking themselves up now for some serious competition...
Or not.
Posted by: Zul at February 2, 2008 4:39 PMI agree with Zul. Serious competition would be very glad. The problem is, that in my opinion Google has the far better technology for search results. Only merging Yahoo and MS won't make a big difference in their bad search results as this wouldn't speed up search engine research fast enough. But we'll see...
Posted by: Waschnüsse at February 3, 2008 4:36 AMPost a comment
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To be honest I really hope this means an end to a lot of the Microsoft Windows Live stuff cause it just sucks.
Live Photo Gallery vs Flickr? Who are we kidding here.
Posted by: Kenny at February 2, 2008 2:33 PMLive Mail (Hotmail) vs Yahoo Mail is even a joke. I really hope that a lot of the good (developer support, online services etc) that came together at Yahoo over the last few years manages to survive in the Borg hive.