Marco.org

Vertigo on Microsoft/Yahoo:

I’m still confused about this move by Microsoft. They’re not buying a young, energetic, growing company but an old (relatively), flagging company that can’t seem to turn itself around. Add this to the expected backlash (engineers leaving, users switching) and the need to go into debt to get it done, this deal makes absolutely no sense.

Agreed. I don’t see how this will benefit either company.

Instead of having two massive companies with no direction who waste a lot of money but can’t beat Google, we’ll have one even more massive company with even less direction that will waste even more money and still won’t beat Google.

But there’s an important distinction as long as the companies remain separate: Microsoft doesn’t need to beat Google. If Microsoft would get their act together and focus their efforts into something coherent (which they’ve never done) instead of flailing their arms everywhere, they’d see that they can easily coexist with Google.

Instead, Microsoft is trying to imitate Google’s products badly, while Google is trying to imitate Microsoft’s products badly.

Buying Yahoo will only make this worse - and won’t bring any additional success to anyone.