
Yahoo Should Buy Microsoft - naish
http://www.cringely.com/2009/02/yahoo-should-buy-microsoft/
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gjm11
What he's actually claiming is that Yahoo! should buy _MSN_ , so that MSN gets
the benefit of Yahoo!'s alleged knowledge of how to make money online, and
Yahoo! gets the benefit of having MS as a significant minority owner, which
supposedly would stop them doing silly things that, er, stop them making money
online. The whole thing seems to depend on two contradictory ideas about the
relative cluefulness of Yahoo! and MS.

The nearest I can come to making sense of this is: Cringely thinks that Yahoo!
understand _how_ to make money by doing business online, but that the
management of Yahoo! doesn't really care whether they make money or not and
therefore doesn't bother to do the right things rather than the wrong things.
In that case, having MS as a substantial shareholder might enable MS to
pressure Yahoo! into trying to make money. But this strikes me as very silly
indeed.

Anyway. Can some kind person with the necessary awesome powers please change
the HN title to "Yahoo should buy MSN"?

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jacquesm
What total nonsense. MSN is losing money, sure. But the combined power of MSN
and MSNBC give microsoft mindshare that you could only dream of if you had to
go and buy advertising to get the same effect.

Last I checked it was Microsoft looking to buy Yahoo, not the other way
around. Between MSN and live.com they have traffic galore, and it would
certainly help to solidify microsofts position on the internet.

Especially given that long term they will have to go head to head with Google,
every little bit will help then. The blatant anti-trust violations that
Microsoft practiced in the past will no longer be tolerated, and the opponent
is actually 'qualified' this time, and has a very solid business model.

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jyothi
Random ramble.. One, a company's assets (let alone possible innovative deal
terms where yahoo don't have to spend much) should seem like it can buy
another company. Which in this case is a clear no.

Secondly, given the way yahoo screwed up overture and many other great
acquired products and people, they definitely cannot run a serious OS or
software business, not even half as good as MSFT runs it today.

The only good thing that can happen is someone really focuses on the huge
content and community portals that yahoo has been a leader in well.

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tom_rath
Wait a second... Cringely is concerned about Microsoft screwing up Yahoo?

Yahoo. The company which has been incapable of implementing business-friendly
search advertising after more than a decade of trying? _That_ Yahoo?!?

Heck, if Yahoo's Sponsored Search provided the same limited functionality
Microsoft Live delivers today, we'd be happy to shovel buckets of advertising
dollars their way. Yahoo is definitely not the zombie one would want in charge
of that business partnership.

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bdfh42
The post title is "link bait" to front up the begging letter at the bottom of
the item.

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lionhearted
I read a great article about an airplane manufacturer that had tight
operations and grew at a solid, relatively slow rate. They had a really solid
engineering corps, and didn't hire new engineers for certain But wasn't hiring
much on certain parts of their engineering corps. Then they look around, and
realize in a decade, everyone's going to retire and they'll lose all the
knowledge that wasn't handed down. All that expertise, know-how, common sense,
and hard lessons learned were going to evaporate if they didn't have young
people working on it, and veterans handing down the valuable lessons.

Microsoft absolutely needs to be developing and growing online business for
the innovation and expertise that come from it. Even if they lose money on
most of their online ventures, they _still_ need to do it. Who thinks the
desktop OS and business software is going to be a huge cash cow in 20 years?
MS needs smart people learning, building, experimenting, and doing cool stuff
online to keep going.

