5 ms·

First of all, when/if Microsoft buys Yahoo, some big shareholders wont be shareholders anymore .. they'll be cashed out. Microsoft is offering more per share t

First of all, when/if Microsoft buys Yahoo, some big shareholders wont be shareholders anymore .. they'll be cashed out. Microsoft is offering more per share than the current share price, benefiting shareholders. A MicroHoo has better long term prospects of competing with Google, creating additional long term value for the shareholders.

Xichekolas 18y ago
> A MicroHoo has better long term prospects of competing with Google To compete with Google they need brilliant engineers and ideas. Merging isn't going to magically produce those. About the only advantage Microsoft offers Yahoo in this is access to their desktop and a huge pile of cash that allows Yahoo to chase crazy strategies with slim chances of huge payoff, assuming Yahoo has some ideas like that. Yahoo offers Microsoft eyeballs.
- wheels 18y ago
  Could we stop already with the Google worshiping? Google's days as the break-away nerd company with more brains than bucks have been over for a while. A lot of Google's "brilliant ideas" were actually pioneered at Yahoo and then made their way over to Google (this goes for recent things too). Everybody's trying to be Google's baby, but Yahoo's not exactly been a slouch in internet innovation.
  - Xichekolas 18y ago
    I wasn't in any way trying to claim Google is the end-all-be-all of the Internet either. Sorry if the word 'brilliant' made it seem that way. I wish people would stop assuming that anything that doesn't outright slam Google implies that whoever wrote it is a fanboy. Google has a lead, and usually to overcome a lead by an established player in a market, you need to be brilliant. If you have been around here and sipped some of the startup kool-aid you would know that. I'm not even sure what "being Google's baby" means... but I'm definitely not trying to be one. My point was that simply merging isn't going to magically create ideas and execution (good engineers). All it creates is a distraction, while the two sets of management elbow for position and a ton of employees flee. So maybe MicroHoo doesn't need brilliant ideas and engineers, but it needs some of each, and merging isn't going to create any of either, and will most likely scare away quite a few of the great engineers that both companies already have.
    - wheels 18y ago
      Sorry for the tone; there is a lot of Google fanboi-ism on HN, so my reaction was as much to the general phenomenon as your post. I think brilliant (well, clever is usually the word I would use, brilliance is much more rare) ideas are what make 4 guys in a garage able to take on a market leader, but when you've got a merger of companies with a combined market capitalization of over $300 billion, blunt force often does the trick. This is sumo wrestling, not fencing. :-) And in the world of blunt force, the combined forces of the most profitable company in the technology market and the most popular site on the internet could pack a pretty hefty punch. I don't think that's a particularly good strategy for MS to pursue, but I wouldn't misunderestimate them.
      - Xichekolas 18y ago
        > This is sumo wrestling, not fencing. Very good point. I still think big companies can fence. Granted, Amazon's market cap is only like 1/10th of that ($32 billion), but it's AWS products are fairly innovative and leading their space at the moment. So big companies can innovate, they just seem slow and totally random about it. I guess I'm just not seeing what there is to 'blunt force' in the market. You can't force people to buy your ad space. I guess if they could demonstrate clearly more eyeballs and higher CTR than adwords, advertisers would flock... is that what you envision?
        wheels 18y ago
        Big companies can innovate, but the whole MS / Yahoo debacle seems to be about a clash of titans in entrenched spaces. MS has a bigger warchest than Google and with the combined MS / Yahoo they'd have more eyes too. They could run that segment of their market at a loss for a while to try to steal some of Adwords' thunder. Think of MS's entrance into the game console or MP3 player markets. While, again, I don't think it's a great strategy to plow into entrenched markets like that, compared to creating new markets (a la your Amazon example), MS has certainly demonstrated a willingness to do so. In fact, I'd say that's almost they corporate modus operandi; almost their complete history has been bulldozing their way into markets using sheer brawn.

Xichekolas 18y ago

> A MicroHoo has better long term prospects of competing with Google To compete with Google they need brilliant engineers and ideas. Merging isn't going to magically produce those. About the only advantage Microsoft offers Yahoo in this is access to their desktop and a huge pile of cash that allows Yahoo to chase crazy strategies with slim chances of huge payoff, assuming Yahoo has some ideas like that. Yahoo offers Microsoft eyeballs.

wheels 18y ago
Could we stop already with the Google worshiping? Google's days as the break-away nerd company with more brains than bucks have been over for a while. A lot of Google's "brilliant ideas" were actually pioneered at Yahoo and then made their way over to Google (this goes for recent things too). Everybody's trying to be Google's baby, but Yahoo's not exactly been a slouch in internet innovation.
- Xichekolas 18y ago
  I wasn't in any way trying to claim Google is the end-all-be-all of the Internet either. Sorry if the word 'brilliant' made it seem that way. I wish people would stop assuming that anything that doesn't outright slam Google implies that whoever wrote it is a fanboy. Google has a lead, and usually to overcome a lead by an established player in a market, you need to be brilliant. If you have been around here and sipped some of the startup kool-aid you would know that. I'm not even sure what "being Google's baby" means... but I'm definitely not trying to be one. My point was that simply merging isn't going to magically create ideas and execution (good engineers). All it creates is a distraction, while the two sets of management elbow for position and a ton of employees flee. So maybe MicroHoo doesn't need brilliant ideas and engineers, but it needs some of each, and merging isn't going to create any of either, and will most likely scare away quite a few of the great engineers that both companies already have.
  - wheels 18y ago
    Sorry for the tone; there is a lot of Google fanboi-ism on HN, so my reaction was as much to the general phenomenon as your post. I think brilliant (well, clever is usually the word I would use, brilliance is much more rare) ideas are what make 4 guys in a garage able to take on a market leader, but when you've got a merger of companies with a combined market capitalization of over $300 billion, blunt force often does the trick. This is sumo wrestling, not fencing. :-) And in the world of blunt force, the combined forces of the most profitable company in the technology market and the most popular site on the internet could pack a pretty hefty punch. I don't think that's a particularly good strategy for MS to pursue, but I wouldn't misunderestimate them.
    - Xichekolas 18y ago
      > This is sumo wrestling, not fencing. Very good point. I still think big companies can fence. Granted, Amazon's market cap is only like 1/10th of that ($32 billion), but it's AWS products are fairly innovative and leading their space at the moment. So big companies can innovate, they just seem slow and totally random about it. I guess I'm just not seeing what there is to 'blunt force' in the market. You can't force people to buy your ad space. I guess if they could demonstrate clearly more eyeballs and higher CTR than adwords, advertisers would flock... is that what you envision?
      - wheels 18y ago
        Big companies can innovate, but the whole MS / Yahoo debacle seems to be about a clash of titans in entrenched spaces. MS has a bigger warchest than Google and with the combined MS / Yahoo they'd have more eyes too. They could run that segment of their market at a loss for a while to try to steal some of Adwords' thunder. Think of MS's entrance into the game console or MP3 player markets. While, again, I don't think it's a great strategy to plow into entrenched markets like that, compared to creating new markets (a la your Amazon example), MS has certainly demonstrated a willingness to do so. In fact, I'd say that's almost they corporate modus operandi; almost their complete history has been bulldozing their way into markets using sheer brawn.