I made it to the Bay Area at 10am from Boston this morning.
By the time I landed, I had voicemails, emails, Twitters and my Tumblr dashboard was filled with posts all about Microsoft’s offer to buy Yahoo.
There are lots of folks that are giving Microsoft credit for their bid and how they did it.
There are plenty of critics about how badly Yahoo is screwing up their once beloved company.
There are many pointing out that both of these companies lost their way.
This proposed deal also challenges a Microsoft (self proclaimed) mantra for decades which is that they may not get something right but by version3.0 they will nail it. Well I guess they dont’ feel that way about search, advertising, community and web services.
But this is a bad move. Not only for Yahoo – but for Microsoft as well.
And it’s not good for entrepreneurs.
And it’s not good for their customers.
These cultures are about as different as it gets.
I can’t think of single combination of this scale that worked out even reasonaby well.
On the other hand there are significant examples where big companies started to falter and their management was able to turn things around. It’s hard but much better than a merger. Consider the dark & challenging days at Apple, Cisco, IBM, Adobe and yes even Microsoft to name a few. (by the way, it’s fun to pick on MSFT but they just had a killer quarter).
Yahoo has some amazing brands, properties and a loyal following at places like del.icio.us, flickr, my.yahoo, finance.yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Answers to name a few. I hope Private Equity or Apple comes to Yahoo’s rescue. I know it’s unlikely given the price and Apple doens’t like to buy things at this scale even though they could afford it.
This is all good for Google. They must be smiling away in Mtn View today.