Things have moved incredibly quickly since Friday morning when, in heavy-handed fashion, Microsoft announced they wanted to buy Yahoo! for $44.6 billion. Not only has it led News International to scramble around to get an offer in, Google has weighed in presumptuously offering help (Google clearly see themselves as the ‘good guys’, even now) and all-in-all very few people relish the idea of the internet institution getting swallowed up by the still-powerful but unloved Microsoft machine.
The deal throws an enormous amount of questions in to the air – questions the legion of voices on the web have been attempting to answer over the last few days. Just one example: the two companies have profoundly different ways of using technology. Yahoo! is a firm supporter of open-source, whether it is through their use of PHP/FreeBSD/Linux or the sharing of their own technologies, while Microsoft use their own proprietary software. When Microsoft bought Hotmail the switch over from open-source to Microsoft technologies was a long and painful process. Will the same happen again for Yahoo!’s multitude of products, a much more complex switch-over?
What is most depressing about it all is that this does not feel like an exciting deal that will lead to new innovation and business ideas, but is instead two companies struggling to understand and deal with their ongoing lacklustre performance on the web. This is a situation that will excite Wall Street, but few other people. That said, Yahoo!, with a new CEO, a restructured organisation, and still huge amounts of design and engineering talent have a very good chance of recovery – which would not be realised if they bow to the pressure to sell.
4 February, 2008
I don’t agree on microsoft’s announcedment. I always want to see Yahoo as a inidividual owner.