BuzzMachine

Great post Jeff…

I was on the conference call from Microsoft this morning, but they only answered questions from financial annalists. I wanted to ask about the cultural differences, I believe the best and brightest Yahoo talent will take the money and run, so much for all the synergies.

The best and most perceptive few paragraphs I’ve read today on the deal. Thanks Jeff.

I could not agree more and wrote something very similar on my blog.

Best,

BW

I think this is a misreading of the information landscape. Of course business is focused on revenue and content is just the bait to attract eyeballs, but information is not the same as cornflakes.

Information is what keeps a society informed and (hopefully) prevents the creation of an oligopoly or plutocracy. Notice that one of the first steps of dictatorial regimes is to shut down sources of information: broadcast stations, cell phone communications and internet access. This is what happened recently in Burma and people still don’t know the story of the crackdown.

Google is not a “portal”, it is a filter. People recognize when the filtering is done in a heavy handed manner as in China, but with Google now having over 60% of the worldwide search market anything it does to shape access can have profound repercussions. A simple mis-indexing can cause a site to “disappear”. Their ranking system has also been the source of much discussion and game playing. Much of this has been for commercial advantage, but attempts at “Google bombing” have had political motivations.

What happens when there are only two search engines and they are told to suppress certain information from appearing in responses to searches? The ease with which the telecom companies went along with wiretapping requests from the government gives a hint of how much resistance the search firms are likely to put up when told to censor for “national security” reasons.

Democracy cannot function without a free flow of information, having two “portals” is not a good way to ensure this.

What about Flickr, deli.icio.us or any number of other services that are owned by yahoo but run independently of the larger site.

I agree that their are things that yahoo doesn’t do very well, but they do some thing very very well that I would hate for MS to get their hands on and mess with. . . .

Either Microsoft has lost its corporate mind, or they are very clever and this is just a red herring.

Buying Yahoo would be a very big headache for Microsoft:

– Cultural differences – most of the staff don’t like Microsoft and most of the time have spoken against them

– As far as I know, none of Yahoo runs Microsoft software for it’s applications or server management.

– Backlash of large amount of Yahoo users WILL move (to Google?).

Why a red herring? To force someone else to bid and pay over the odds for a troubled darling of the Internet. Thus weakening the competition (both the acquirer and Yahoo themselves due to the necessary focus on the takeover operations), and at the same time removing large amounts of available funds from development of more ‘anti-Microsoft’ solutions.

Great tactics worthy of any scholar of SUN TSU – The Art of War.

All of you have brought up good points worth consideration.

MSFT’s desire to acquire Yahoo displays a lack of imagination. They will never beat Google at their game. Google is too deeply entrenched as the “go-to” search engine in the present format of search. What MSFT needs to do is change the game. MSFT… don’t by an ice truck company… invent the refrigerator. Is there someone from MSFT whom I could contact to discuss my ideas?