And we thought the MySQL deal was bad news...

Feb 01, 2008

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Submitted By: Justin Stanley
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News

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Just stumbled across this bit o' news that hit the street a little while ago:

Microsoft Offers to Buy Yahoo for $44.6 Billion

First of all.. Holy hell, that's a lot of money. As the Bloomberg folks said:

Steve Ballmer is attempting the biggest-ever technology takeover after failing to compete with Google

I don't use any of Yahoo's services, not since I cured my online cribbage addiction about 10 years ago anyway, so I frankly don't care much about what might happen to their offerings if that acquisition goes through. And judging by the fact that only 1.2% of our site's visitors** ended up here via Yahoo, well, that tells me y'all aren't exactly on their bandwagon, either.

My biggest concern is what might happen with Google... Surely the Google juggernaut couldn't sustain it's current rate of growth for much longer regardless, but a fully armed and operational MS/Yahoo battlestation might throw a bigger kink in things.

Big winners in this are clearly the Yahoo shareholders. So far today, Yahoo is up 8.35 (43.53%), while Microsoft and Google stock have dropped 2.09 (6.41% and 50.60 (8.97%), respectively. Those numbers, of course, according to Google Finance. :)

** Nerdliness.com visitors are incredibly Google/Firefox biased. Since we went live, the break down of our visitors by browser and search engine looks something like this:

Google: 97.6%
Yahoo: 1.2%
MSN/Live: .8%

Firefox: 68.49%
IE: 18.19%
Safari: 6.32%
Opera: 4.03%

Probably means that the ASP.NET articles we've been thinking about won't really go over too well around here, eh? Oh, well.

References:

Bloomberg: Microsoft Offers to Buy Yahoo for $44.6 Billion

Google Finance: Yahoo!

Make people smarter:

Google Strikes Back...

Submitted by Justin Stanley on Mon, 02/04/2008 - 19:18.

Just read this blog post by David Drummond, Senior VP of Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer about the deal. Oddly, it doesn't sound like he's onboard with the deal:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/yahoo-and-future-of-internet.html

I don't know... maybe it's the questions he asks about it?

Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC?

and...

Could the acquisition of Yahoo! allow Microsoft -- despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses -- to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the Internet?

Honestly, I don't think that MS will (or could) exert "inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet," even with the Yahoo! brand in the family. If anything, I'd hope that the opposite would prove true, that this might be a sign that MS is going to start to really embrace the core values Drummond mentions in his post (Internet openness, choice and innovation) as seriously as the G-Men do.