Microsoft has apparently offered to buy Yahoo! for the paltry sum of $44.6 billion. This bothers me. First of all, Microsoft has had almost a monopoly in the OS market for the last couple of decades, and we all know how they handled that. If they get a majority share of the planet’s search traffic, who knows what kind of power they will wield; most users of the internet would be subject to Microsoft’s will. Which would likely not be fun.
What about Yahoo!’s various acquired services? Yahoo! has had the decency to not mess with the designs of Flickr and del.icio.us, for example, and Microsoft will probably not exhibit the same level of respect. Rebranding by Microsoft would mean that several of Yahoo’s acquired products will become fugly, privacy-breaching, and generally unusable.
And Microsoft’s products? Well, Microsoft and Yahoo! users would likely have to merge their accounts, causing all sorts of problems, data loss, and incompatibility in the process.
Obviously, I’m none too excited about this news, and I hope the deal falls through.
Microsoft-Yahoo: What Will Stay And What Will Go? (TechCrunch)
If MS-Yahoo goes through, it will mean tough times for many many people. Yahoo has lots of online service sections, besides search and mobile, it has hotjobs, personals, online shopping and car selling, etc. While Yahoo can co-exists with many compititors, MS has a history of killing its compititors. I remember Sun-down was one of the buzz-word inside MS a few years ago, means Sun Micro Systems was already down from the list, in which Google was at the top then and now. If Yahoo merges with MS, the MS culture of killing and monoply will prevail. Then the bad time for those companies like Monster etc which have overlapping business with the current Yahoo will come.
The next worrysome people group will be Yahoo employees. If Jerry Yang goes with the layoff procedure, he could at most cut about 10-20%. But if merges with MS, I doubt MS will continue use the skill-set of Yahoo people, i.e. openbsd, java, etc. so most people, perhaps 50% of yahoo people would have to go.
That sounds absolutely horrifying. D:
Poor Microsoft, King of our home computers, but not of search engines. This will automatically grant MS 2nd place.
If I owned Microsoft, I would buy Yahoo in a New York minute.
So, what’s next; who will eventually buy-out eBay? Is this where this is leading to?
Join me in my logo contest for Yahoo’s new logo: http://webdesignbysteve.com/blog/?p=58
PS: I’ll add your logo to my post at http://webdesignbysteve.com/blog/?p=57
Poor Microsoft? If you say so, but I don’t feel the same way about them.
Haha, great post, thanks! ^_^
There is a worrying trend here - Microsoft uses its considerable free cash flow from being a monopoly to buy up vibrant and diverse companies/services and ‘Microsoft them’ in terms of offering inept and poorly design products and services - after all if you are a monopoly why even try to be innovative or excite customers if they have no choice.