Microsoft Offers $44bil for Yahoo

pirate.jpg

Again, I try to stay out of the mergers and acquisitions business realm, but sometimes I have to say something. Microsoft's offer of $44bil for Yahoo is one such time. There was a time that Microsoft was the best thing for the computer industry. Prior to Windows and it's abstraction of the peripherals like displays and printers, every application needed to have people on staff to work out the graphical interface and write drivers for each printer they wanted to support. WordStar was a classic example. Gobs of driver disks and you have to make sure that what you needed to be supported was, in fact, supported by the code.

Major hassles. Then came Windows with it's printer driver model and graphics support. Application support teams no longer had to support each and every printer and display. Way easier for someone to make an app now. This was really the 'gift' of Windows and Microsoft. And it was good.

Similarly, in the beginning, there were a few web crawlers, like lycos - ones that you could use, but you almost always had to have several, and there were even applications on some platforms that would hit several search engines to try and get you something useful with a single query. Then came Yahoo. Again, it was an early pioneer, and it made a big difference in the search engine landscape. It also was one of the first to have 'busy' home pages - portals, many called them, with news, groups, etc. all on the front page.

But with absolute power comes corruption. Unfortunately, Microsoft, like IBM had to battle a horrible reputation that it had taken years to build. Yahoo sat on it's lead and didn't work to keep itself on top of the heap. Now Microsoft finds itself in the position of playing 'catch-up' to Google in the search engine space. Yahoo has long since fallen to Google as well. It's not surprising that Microsoft (with tons of cash) tries to close the gap on Google with the acquisition of Yahoo, but you can't really catch up to #1 by buying #2. The best you can do is to close the gap a bit.

In the end, what needs to happen at Microsoft is they need to go back to the days when they were innovative and not just making money. Like IBM, they need to repair their image with the developers who ultimately make them look good. Take the time to embrace the non-commercial developer. Make amends, and over the long haul, they'll get back into the coveted spot they once held. But it's going to take more than buying Yahoo to do it.