Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Microsoft opened talks again with Yahoo to potentially acquire them for 50 billion $, it seems. As we’ve seen before, Microsoft’s profits continue to be staggering, they could buy Yahoo at this price with the profits of less than 1 year.

I don’t think it’d be a fit though. All the cool people would leave Yahoo, and it would open up space for another powerhouse to emerge.

What would be the pros for Microsoft:

• They get a web savvy company
• They get a strong brand and loads of traffic
• They get to strengthen their position in the advertisment market

And the cons?

• For us: Yahoo gets assimilated, which means Flickr and del.icio.us get assimilated.
• For M$: they get lots of internal competition. Yahoo just shut down their own internal photo competition. But now Yahoo Mail and Hotmail would be under the same roof, and so on.
• The cultural clashes might last 10+ years and be deadly.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 4th, 2007 at 9:34 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.