Yahoo! + Microsoft < Google
So Microsoft’s going to buy Yahoo! Good for Yahoo!; not so good for Yahoo! users.
The cultures of these companies will not mix. It makes me thing of the joke doing the rounds of the auto industry a few years back:
Q: How do you pronounce ‘DaimlerChrysler’?
A: The ‘Chrsyler’ is silent.
Anything good that Yahoo! brings to the equation (Widgets, Flickr, search) will be obliterated almost immediately or allowed to wither slowly.
But this is really all about Google:
It is a shotgun marriage, but the person holding the shotgun is Google…
—Tim Weber, business editor, BBC News website
Microsoft is finally admitting that Live.com is no threat to Google, and it really needs to be a player in the online advertising space that Google owns.
Microsoft will spend the next three years rebuilding everything Yahoo! has from the ground-up with their own tools, just because they need to prove they eat their own dogfood; that’s a lot of money just to buy a brand.
