Microsoft and Yahoo - it isn’t about Google
Classic strategic thinking says that you don’t attack your opponent where he’s strong. Instead you choose the ground that suits your strengths. The current noise about Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo seems to mainly assume that it’s an attempt to gain strength in ’search’ capability to fight Google. I don’t buy that, because it’s bad strategy.
So what do you get if you put Microsoft and Yahoo together? Dominance in free ‘email’ - a far bigger application than search, both in user-specific traffic and in eyeball time. Email is personal information and communication. Email has a more natural progression than search to other applications involving personal information and communication. And despite the apparent appeal of free tools like Google Apps, the reality is that the vast majority of the world’s users (i.e. the non-geeks) are very comfortable with MS products for this kind of thing.
If MS pull off their takeover bid, watch what they do with email.
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February 18th, 2008 at 7:59 am
Hi Jim,
couldn’t agree with you more about this not being about search. not sure about the email thing but it has legs. My first reaction was that this was about getting access to the Yahoo talent pool. I don’t know quite how that gel’s with the recent reorg in MS and the layoffs in Yahoo.
MS are a lot things, Stupid ain’t one of them… they did this for a reason
February 21st, 2008 at 8:22 pm
[…] Microsoft and Yahoo - it isn’t about Google […]
May 4th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
[…] Yahoo still asking for $37. Given the scale of the deal, and the potential for a clever play based (as I saw it) on email, I’m surprised. I thought Balmer would go hostile and pursue a proxy fight, which […]