When Microsoft’s push against Yahoo! comes to shove

Things about Microhoo’s affair are getting more and more complicated. To sum up: Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo!; Yahoo! does not want to be acquired by Microsoft; Google does not want Yahoo! to be acquired by Microsoft; Google inks a deal with Yahoo! to display AdSense search results in the US for a test period; Microsoft complains about this pact and plans to team up with News Corps to try and lay its hands on Yahoo!; Yahoo! keeps on talking with AOL for a hypothetical merge with the Time Warner company.Surely, it is quite an odd situation: if someone had told me 6 months ago that Google would have been Yahoo!’s ally, I would have laughed out loud.
Mashable! suggests that this could be just a loose-loose situation, which only Google can win. In their opinion, Yahoo! and AOL are just two tired giants: the result of a merge of two tired giants is an even bigger giant even more tired. On the other side, Microsoft and News Corps are willing to blow their money on acquiring the Sunnyvale-base company, but it is definitely not worth it. Only Google has a stake in letting things getting more confusing.

The thinking behind this, is that business models followed by both Yahoo! and Microsoft are out-of-date, obsolete and only Google is “thinking different”. This is definitely true, everyone knows how much Google has changed the web and how much it keeps on changing it every day. At the same time we know that online revolutions often come from the bottom, from a single significant idea or a low-budget project, as it was for YouTube, Facebook or Google itself. So now we are expecting the next revolution to be started by a unknown name.

But we cannot disregard the actual influence of these giants that, even if old and tired, own - beyond a well-known brand - wide-ranging business activities and huge numbers of very popular services: just think about either Yahoo! Mail or MSN Live Messenger. Perhaps, seeing things from this point of view, we can suggest that Microsoft-Yahoo!’s affair is not to be regarded necessarily as the start of an incoming online revolution, but rather a money-oriented deal, in order to take advantage of what is already here, including advertising networks, audience reach and loyal customers.
Maybe company like Yahoo! or AOL could be tired giants; but they are always Giants.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Marketing Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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