Yahoo Should Buy Microsoft

What he's actually claiming is that Yahoo! should buy MSN, so that MSN gets the benefit of Yahoo!'s alleged knowledge of how to make money online, and Yahoo! gets the benefit of having MS as a significant minority owner, which supposedly would stop them doing silly things that, er, stop them making money online. The whole thing seems to depend on two contradictory ideas about the relative cluefulness of Yahoo! and MS.

The nearest I can come to making sense of this is: Cringely thinks that Yahoo! understand how to make money by doing business online, but that the management of Yahoo! doesn't really care whether they make money or not and therefore doesn't bother to do the right things rather than the wrong things. In that case, having MS as a substantial shareholder might enable MS to pressure Yahoo! into trying to make money. But this strikes me as very silly indeed.

Anyway. Can some kind person with the necessary awesome powers please change the HN title to "Yahoo should buy MSN"?

What total nonsense. MSN is losing money, sure. But the combined power of MSN and MSNBC give microsoft mindshare that you could only dream of if you had to go and buy advertising to get the same effect.

Last I checked it was Microsoft looking to buy Yahoo, not the other way around. Between MSN and live.com they have traffic galore, and it would certainly help to solidify microsofts position on the internet.

Especially given that long term they will have to go head to head with Google, every little bit will help then. The blatant anti-trust violations that Microsoft practiced in the past will no longer be tolerated, and the opponent is actually 'qualified' this time, and has a very solid business model.

Random ramble.. One, a company's assets (let alone possible innovative deal terms where yahoo don't have to spend much) should seem like it can buy another company. Which in this case is a clear no.

Secondly, given the way yahoo screwed up overture and many other great acquired products and people, they definitely cannot run a serious OS or software business, not even half as good as MSFT runs it today.

The only good thing that can happen is someone really focuses on the huge content and community portals that yahoo has been a leader in well.

Wait a second... Cringely is concerned about Microsoft screwing up Yahoo?

Yahoo. The company which has been incapable of implementing business-friendly search advertising after more than a decade of trying? _That_ Yahoo?!?

Heck, if Yahoo's Sponsored Search provided the same limited functionality Microsoft Live delivers today, we'd be happy to shovel buckets of advertising dollars their way. Yahoo is definitely not the zombie one would want in charge of that business partnership.

The post title is "link bait" to front up the begging letter at the bottom of the item.

I read a great article about an airplane manufacturer that had tight operations and grew at a solid, relatively slow rate. They had a really solid engineering corps, and didn't hire new engineers for certain But wasn't hiring much on certain parts of their engineering corps. Then they look around, and realize in a decade, everyone's going to retire and they'll lose all the knowledge that wasn't handed down. All that expertise, know-how, common sense, and hard lessons learned were going to evaporate if they didn't have young people working on it, and veterans handing down the valuable lessons.

Microsoft absolutely needs to be developing and growing online business for the innovation and expertise that come from it. Even if they lose money on most of their online ventures, they still need to do it. Who thinks the desktop OS and business software is going to be a huge cash cow in 20 years? MS needs smart people learning, building, experimenting, and doing cool stuff online to keep going.