It’s true! In what many can only assume is a purely desperate attempt to ‘buy in’ to the chase of Google’s Search domination, Microsoft have offered a bid to struggling Yahoo! worth about £22 Billion! That’s a lot of money and around 60% above the Yahoo! share price before this announcement (though shares at Yahoo have unsurprisingly now risen by about 50% as a result!)
Question is…why do Microsoft want Yahoo!? Well, everybody knows of the rivalry between Google and Microsoft and Google have moved into what many have assumed is an unassailable lead in the search market. But it’s not all about search. Yahoo have the popular, but distinquished photo sharing site; Flickr and also their own reliable webmail program and many forget that these guys were performing Search when Google was still a high school project! Recent years though have shown the paid search of Yahoo to be not only unreliable but also less profitable and Yahoo had recently issued a sort of profits warning and board members had walked. Last summers UK Paid Search algorithm and technology update saw many a loyal YSM! paid search supporter walk to Google where advertising costs are now closer and volumes a lot stronger.
If, and it is still a big if, Microsoft were to take on Yahoo!, we would have a Search Media empire which could seriously take on Google…if the right management was put in place to mould the new combined company into a streamlined and concentrated effort. Yahoo Search Marketing’s (YSM!) customer service is crap in the UK (fellow Brits using the service will be nodding their heads at this stage) and MSN have had a tendency to over engineer their search efforts much to the amusement of the boys and girls at Google, so £22 Billion would be an awful lot of money to waste just to scare Google for a month or two….
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(wb) Russ