By now you have probably heard the news that Microsoft has made a bid for Yahoo!. Since so many people are covering it I thought it would be best to do a end of day wrapup about the proposed Microsoft Yahoo! news.
By the time I got to the office today, I had already heard, from several people, the news about Microsoft making an unsolicited bid for Yahoo!. I have to admit that I first saw the news via the NBC Today Show over my morning liter of coffee.
The day started with reading Loren’s take on the news and me submitting it to Sphinn, my favorite place to keep up with the latest internet marketing/online marketing news.
I normally don’t get a lot of people in my office talking and mentioning it, but since I happen to have a Yahoo! button on my desk (as pictured below) there were many people passing by today asking what I thought of the news.
I even had the opportunity to be asked by Kevin about what I thought. Here’s what I told him:
1. The benefits of combining Panama and adCenter, or replacing one with the other. Ultimately combining or replacing one of
the other would have to be done. I don’t know a lot about their backends, so it hard to comment about which should replace
which from a technical standpoint. Perhaps they both could be merged somehow. From what I can tell, though, it might make
sense for them to keep Panama since I believe Yahoo! Search Marketing has more customers on that platform at this point.
2. Best way to combine the search and directories of each company.The Microsoft bCentral directory was turned off a while
back, so I believe that keeping the current Yahoo! Directory would make sense, especially since it’s been around for so
long now. I could see a change in pricing, though.
3. The benefits Msft would see by adding Yahoo’s social networking properties, or how a Msft acquisition might affect those
properties?Microsoft would definitely benefit from adding Yahoo!’s social networking properties, especially since Microsoft
isn’t really known right now for social networking. It also gives Microsoft more places to run ads, and we’ve already seen
that recently with the addition of Microsoft’s ads running on Digg
This afternoon I had the pleasure of talking to a good friend (you know who you are) who has some additional knowledge
about the subject based on his background. Apparently his take on it is that it looks like this deal is going to happen.
And apparently he thinks “the result will be ugly”.
