Microsoft + Yahoo! – Does it Matter?
Roughly a year ago, there was a lot of talk about Microsoft buying Yahoo! outright. It seemed very juvenile in the public eye watching them go back and forth. Microsoft offered some money, Yahoo! said “No, we want more”. Microsoft said we’re walking, Yahoo! said fine. A bit of time went by, Microsoft made another offer after watching Yahoo! have another miserable quarter. Yahoo! still said no. This happened a few times, and eventually, the deal seemed dead.
Fast forward to July 2009, and the deal not only picked up steam, but actually happened; though not in it’s original form. Microsoft and Yahoo! will be getting together on search technologies, with Yahoo! leading the charge on that. There will be cross branding. It will be sloppy.
With Microsoft’s recent launch of Bing, it seemed like things were picking up in Redmond. Until people started to use it. It’s nice to look at, and has some neat little features, but the search results are pretty terrible. Once that started being noticed by the public, Microsoft went back to Yahoo! and worked out a deal.
So, while it’s not quite got the media hubbub from the original news break, does this joint venture really matter? Not really.
Both companies have a glut of technologies and sites out there that are still confusing to most end users. The naming conventions aren’t the same across the board. They replace one thing with another and leave the original still hanging out there too long. Throw two companies together who can’t get their stuff organized, and you’ve got an even bigger mess.
I’m sure there will be one ‘main’ product that they focus on. And I am also pretty sure that Bing will remain THE search engine that they push, but everything else they try to get into is going to be ugly. They both offer similar products (sports, photos, news, personals, finance), so if they opt to integrate them (which I don’t think is part of the deal) could also be unpleasant for everyone. If Yahoo! had agreed to be bought out and allowed Microsoft to envelop them wholly, this could have been a much cleaner process.
Bottom line is, can they take down Google, or at least make a dent in their market share? I don’t think that this merger, knowing each company’s past, is going to make any major waves in the search market. Unless of course they do everything perfectly, but somehow, I doubt that.
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