Clearly, Microsoft looking to acquire Yahoo! suggests a direct run at Google. And I’ve heard rumblings from people over the years about various Yahoo! products being superior to their Google counterparts: Y! mail, for instance, lead Gmail in innovations for quite some time before Gmail started catching up again late last year. And I’ve heard only good things about Yahoo!’s User Interface Library, though I personally haven’t spent a lot of time investigating it.
But MS and Yahoo! both have struggled to capture the public’s imagination nearly as much as Google continually does. It looks like a long shot to me. But if I were making the decisions at MS, I would absolutely do it. If nothing else, Yahoo! is a far less hated brand than almost anything Microsoft owns. Heck, that’s got to be worth millions all by itself.
Yahoo features may be less hated than MS, but that will only hold true for as long as MS doesn’t fuck with them. As soon as Yahoo email gets the Hotmail treatment, etc, it’s all over.
I hope this doesn’t go through, I’d hate to have to close my flickr and Y! mail accounts, some that I’ve had for over 10 years.
Yeah, if I was MS I would be all for this. But if I was Yahoo I’d be kicking and screaming against it. Well, unless of course I was someone who could cash in on the sale and then get the hell out 🙂
I’ve actually heard people suggest that anyone needing employees in CA will have their pick if MS does buy Yahoo. Knowing what happened to Hotmail, how many people will stay? I’d leave.