The tango begins then, eh? Microsucks, the biggie, wants to buy out Yahoo! I won’t repeat the whole story, a lot of which you can read here, and here. Just to put things into perspective, the $44.6 billion that Microsucks has agreed to pay Yahoo! is MORE than the total assets Google had in 2007 – which stand at around $25 billion. And guess what? For the first time in its history, M$ will be borrowing, yes, you heard it right, borrowing money to buy someone else!
Simple point is, I’m going to ditch supporting Yahoo! the very day it’s bought out by Microsucks. I will have to put up with services which I don’t like from Google, but it’s a case of ideology. And I’m sure many Yahoo! developers will leave the fold too, rather than spend their time shifting everything to Windows servers, like Microshaft did when it bought out Hotmail. Frankly, I don’t see stuff like Yahoo!’s OpenID scheme et al going further either in that case, because Microsucks will be pushing its own Passport sign-in.
Google’s scared too, as its CEO Eric Schmidt called up Chief Yahoo! Jerry Yang offering help to rebuff the offer. It does seem though that the offer would be too tempting for the shareholders to refuse. Damn, but I personally wouldn’t like that to happen. The clown Semel has left, and under Jerry, Yahoo! was turning around in the proper direction pretty well. OK, profits were down, but there’s been a real change in Yahoo!’s outlook in the past six months under Yang. Given time, I’m sure Yahoo! can be much bigger player. There used to be a time when Google had 90% of the search market – today it’s down to 77% with Yahoo! at around 20%. That IS quite a jump.
I just hope for Yahoo!’s sake that it has the courage to spurn down Microsucks and brave it out on its own – it CAN do a lot more on its own, given a bit more time.
One reply on “Big Fish, Small Fish”
true but lets see what happens because the people at Microsucks (or suckers whatever) have got REAL brains….personally i want yahoo to stay as it is…not with MS nor with google.