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Will Microsoft Give Up On Yahoo

We’ve heard so much about the subject already, the truth is that I’m as tired as when the only conversation you’ll hear was iPhone this, iPhone that. Microsoft made a bid on Yahoo for little over 40 Billion dollars, after Yahoo take some time to think about it, we heard that the Yahoo campus is undervaluing Yahoo. The whole thing is one big mess mainly because you would think this kind of offers comes after long periods of discussion, which was not the case.

The funniest part was that many people talk about the subject like it was the end of the world. I got a kick out of some ideas, like some Flickr user group came up with the slogan “Keep your evil grubby hands off our flickr group”, funny indeed but the reality is that several thousand people joined the group.

I was listening to John C. Devorak talk on his show Cranky Geeks arguing about what was the point on Microsoft wanting to buy Yahoo. True above all, I heard someone say somewhere that Microsoft idea of innovation was via acquisition, here is yet another example with the whole Yahoo hostile takeover.

The truth is that I don’t find any of this hostile or troublesome, Yahoo is a great company but the their user base has decline in the last couple of years. Companies like Google among others are giving a good show of market competition. What’s in for Yahoo? What’s in for Microsoft?

Yahoo has a great number of people using Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger, Microsoft’s Hotmail is a big web mail client as well as good Messenger user base. Combined they are definitely bigger than Google since Gmail is not as big as some may think and don’t get me started on Google’s Talk chat client. I’m not saying these Google products are not good, it’s just that people haven’t got around it.

In advertising revenue is where both Yahoo and Microsoft fail, Google has managed to stay top in the competition, so far ahead that the only way for the other two companies to be relevant are by joining forces. I heard people saying that Microsoft should focus on their core competencies and forget about Yahoo. I disagree, they need to do both, they need to work on an OS (operating system) that after five years in development, it works.

At the same time the OS market has very little to add to our desktop world, what else are you expecting from an OS. MS Office has growth potential but not if Microsoft decides to change the language structure every six years. Yahoo has done great stuff, but also most of their innovation is via acquisition too.

After all these two companies are not as different as one may think, there’s still time, Microsoft will try this again, especially in a weak economy like the one we have right now. Whether is or not a good idea, that is not easy to determine, I thought that Time Warner plus AOL merger was a good idea, and it was not.

I just want the conversation to end, I’m tired of this subject. Unless you have something else to add, leave your comments in this post to keep debating about this silly subject.