More Enron School of Business . . .
So in a previous post, I wondered why B of A, who lost billions in the mortgage market, would want to buy CountryWide, who lost billions in the mortgage market.
Today, we have Microsoft, who never has understood “the Internets,” proposing to buy Yahoo!, who consistently gets its collective a** handed back to it, by Google.
So if we take Microsoft’s failed Internet strategy, and combine it with Yahoo’s failing Internet strategy, we get a company that can challenge Google?
Maybe I am just a dumb historian, but I remember the previous deal-to-end-all-deals — the one where a bunch of stodgy old men that didn’t understand the Web (Time Warner) bought an Internet company that also didn’t see the competition coming up behind it (AOL). Yeah, that was gonna be great, too. You would think with the headstart that Time Warner/AOL had, that iTunes should never have gotten off the ground! Content, distribution, and USERS! Man, TW/AOL had it ALL!
There are some positive things happening with Yahoo! (they get OpenID), and the Microsoft Live platform is actually quite cool. But where the Internets and strategy are concerned, these two companies are generally hopeless.
Tac Anderson said:
Yeah, it kind of reminded me of the Sears/Kmart deal. Except Sears and Kmart at least owned a lot of valuable real estate.
Yahoo has a lot of really great sites like del.icio.us and flickr but they still haven’t figured out how to make money with them. Microsoft has a significant share of Facebook, but same story.
Chris said:
The REALLY funny thing is that this won’t help either MS or Yahoo! compete against Google. Google pwns those guys because MS and Yahoo! still don’t get paid search.
Of course none of the three of them really get social networking, which is where advertising dollars are moving.