Now I’ve had more time to think about the matter. And I still can’t see why Microsoft would try to buy out Yahoo! I understand that Microsoft has been badly smacked when Google bought Doubleclick right under its nose. But this looks more like an impulsive move rather than a well thought best laid plan. Both companies could certainly benefit from the merging/takeover by creating an important, if not the most important, source for news and content on the net and possibly multiply exponentially their respective ADs revenue.
Most bloggers around the net, however, suggest that Microsoft also wants to start building an effective offense against Google’s web office suite. Now that would certainly disturb Google’s plans, but correct me if I’m wrong here but doesn’t that jeopardize Microsoft’s plans as well.
Microsoft Office is a very important source of revenue for the company and, although it’s widely accepted that the future of the application is on the web, that is not going to be an easy transition, and spending 50 billions to buy Yahoo! to then burn another considerable amount of money to integrate their products and move Microsoft’s leading product suite to the web seems an incredibly rash move.
Furthermore bringing a team from Yahoo! to work alongside Microsoft’s on a web-based release of Office would be incredibly difficult. I’m talking about bringing all the new people up to speed. That would cause Microsoft to lose even more time whilst Google can calmly keep updating its already launched suite.
I just can’t see it happening.
The WSJ has a very interesting piece about how the acquisition can’t be happening with allot more financial details.
P.S. I stole the images from TechCrunch post on the matter.
Naught but a political move, a smart and correct one nonetheless.
I haven’t got time to write an entire article now but I wanted to post a link for those of you who don’t know what happened yesterday on Digg.
