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Yahoo

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Here’s some more of the value Microsoft sees in Yahoo!

By dlambert ⋅ March 22, 2008 ⋅ View Comments

Apple-style-span” style=”border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;”>Last time, I hinted that there was more than Google-phobia driving this attempted purchase, and there is.  In addition to vaulting overnight to a relevant search power, there are a few other areas where a combined company would become a real market force.

 
Start with email.  Even though GMail is growing quickly, Yahoo! still has a ton of email customers.  Add those to Microsoft‘s Live email, and the combined market share of these two email platforms is on the order of 80%.  That’s a lot of captive desktop time where ads could be shown – if Microhoo can maintain that market share. 

 
Then there’s portal traffic.

Why you should care if Microsoft buys Yahoo?

By dlambert ⋅ March 19, 2008 ⋅ View Comments

Anyone not living under a rock knows that Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo!, but so what?  What difference could it possibly make to an end-user or a software developer whether Yahoo! remains independent or not?

Clearly, this is a buyout of historic proportions.  The size alone is impressive: at $45B, this is a serious chunk of change and a sizable improvement over the market valuation of Yahoo! prior to Microsoft‘s offer.  But this buyout isn’t notable just for size.  This is a pivotal moment in the growth and maturation of the net: a marquis player is quite possibly going to cease to exist independently, and another is at a "make or break" moment.  As far as brands go, this is an impact on the order of seeing Netscape fade away or AOL get gobbled up by Time Warner. Like AOL, it’s quite conceivable that the brand will live on for a long time, but it’s clear that it’ll never again live with the vigor that it’s had in the past.

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