Yahoo-Microsoft
We woke this morning to an radio news report that Microsoft and Yahoo are in merger talks. This kind of thing popped up several times during the time I was there. I recall that in 2006 the hot rumor was that Yahoo and eBay would get together, which would have been interesting for me. The Microsoft rumor has come up a few times in the last few years, too, but this time they sound more serious.
As always there is a lot of armchair quarterbacking about what a combination would look like which is humorous because we don’t have any information about what a combined Microsoft/Yahoo would look like at this stage.
Erick Schonfeld of Business 2.0 posts comments that are typical. He says "any move would smack of desperation" but I think that assigns an emotional quality that doesn’t (or shouldn’t) exist in deals like this, casting Yahoo as the homely prom date and Microsoft as the nerdy (and wealthy) boy next door who can’t get a date no matter how much money he spends on the limousine.
The truth is that Wall Street looks for synergies in any kind of merger/acquisition and there are plenty here. Yes, there are cultural differences between the two companies, but my sense is that they’re not unmanageable, and a healthy cultural cross-pollination could be just what the doctor ordered for both companies. From an engineering/developer standpoint, there’s a
lot to love — Microsoft engages in tons of projects that Yahoo wouldn’t touch today. If Microsoft can attract an engineer like Jim Hugunin to their side, they can certainly find something to keep Yahoo’s senior engineers interested.
