Nerd makes a pass at Geek
For anyone who missed the big tech news this morning, Microsoft has offered to buy Yahoo. For money, too, not old copies of Windows Millenium or a talking paperclip or something. In fact, they're offering $44.60 per share, a 60% premium over the current market price.
This is a bold pitch for Microsoft who is rapidly becoming inconsequential and would probably be a good catch for Yahoo, a quasi-media company with a joke name, a mushy business model, inflated customer statistics and no real market differentiator.
For the acquirer? It would mean Microsoft would be visible on the Web in places that they are not today. One interesting thing that they could and probably should do, would be to figure out how to clean up Yahoo's bloated and ghostly customer list, converting them to something paying. This would allow Microsoft to integrate Yahoo functionality with Xbox live, becoming the first company to link console gaming and the social Internet. That would take years for them to screw up and could become the lifeline to pull Microsoft to a fully reengineered business model, where they became less of a product and more of a web services company.
The combined company should own identity management on the Internet, if they wanted. This would provide an effective bulwark to Google. (They should probably buy Verisign, though).
Could this mean the blue screen of death for the Internet?
Posted on February 01, 2008
