Microsoft Make unsolicited bid to buy Yahoo!

It's sad to see Yahoo flounder like it has. Yahoo has made a number of very smart acquisitions (del.icio.us, Flickr, Upcoming, and many others), but they haven't been able to match Google's ability to monetize search.

Of course, Yahoo has it's own ad network that competes with Google AdWords, but Google dominates that space (and therefore, gets most of the business -- and money). And in search, now people don't even talk about searching for information; they google it!

The Microsoft offer undervalues Yahoo, in my opinion.

What will really change if Microsoft buys Yahoo? Do you think they will shut down or merge services? I mean, they both have email, im, blogs, etc. Will they keep both running or merge them?

Well, it's always a case of big fish gobbling smaller fish, isn't it? Read David Thielen's excellent little book, The 12 Simple Secrets of Microsoft Management (McGraw-Hill, ISBN 0-07-134248-6). Although the book was written almost ten years ago, a lot of the concepts are still happening.

Chapter 1 is aptly titled, "Total World Domination." To quote Thielen: "If Microsoft sets its sights on another company's business, that company can, at best, hold on to part of its former market. At worse, it will have to close its doors." (page 2) And check out this little nugget on page 11: "We didn't write Excel to make money, we wrote it for the sheer joy of putting the largest computer software company out of business." (Lotus was bigger than Microsoft at the time.) -- Chris Peters, when he was head of Excel development.

Sweeney Todd (of all people!) put it rather bluntly when he said: "These are desperate times, and desperate times call for desperate measures." All the Microsoft top brass must have seen this movie, lol.