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ExamForce :: Article Archive :: Newsletter Article
 The Cert Times: IT Edition Article Archive
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| No "MicroYahooSoft" Mutant Babies... So Far (B1N@RY N@T10N (A.J. Axline)) |
Microsoft and Yahoo! sitting in a tree!
K-I-S-S-I-
(CRASH!)
Whoops. A little too much weight on that branch, eh boys?
So, Yahoo! doesn't want to be owned by Microsoft. They just want to be their own crazy cat, taking hits off of the AJAX bong and doing their own Web 2.0 thing. It's no big surprise that Yahoo--
(I'm leaving off the exclamation mark from this point forward because it's an extra keystroke every time, and I am inherently lazy. Besides, the company founders only added the punctuation because "Yahoo" was already trademarked by a company that sold barbecue sauce and steak knives. That's a true story... at least, that's what I read on Wikipedia, and everything on Wikipedia is true when you're writing to a deadline.)
--is acting like a rebellious teenager. The company is twenty years younger than Microsoft; that's over sixty in IT years (formula: multiply regular years by pi). Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang was seven years old when Big Bill was getting down to creating Microsoft in New Mexico. Yang was nine years old when Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was getting his BA from Harvard. To say that there is a generation gap between the two companies is an understatement. Microsoft is "old money" in the industry; Yahoo is a dot-com survivor that has been spending the last decade trying to figure out how to stop Google from beating them up and taking their lunch money on a regular basis.
In 2000, Yahoo stock was worth $475 a share. Can you believe that? That's, like, a tank of gas for a Cadillac Escalade.
I just checked Google's stock price, and it's over $575 a share. Man, that has to sting. Of course, Yahoo owned over 8 million shares of Google before it's IPO in 2004, so they can't be completely bitter. I mean, I would be completely bitter because that's part of my skill set, but that's just me.
So, what the hell does this all mean? Microsoft has supposedly burned through a gajillion dollars developing its Internet properties and presence, and has little to show for it outside of Hotmail, MSN Messenger, and Xbox Live. Yahoo has been an Internet company from the start, and has done some pretty decent things with Flickr, as well as Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Messenger, and its various theme portals for sports, finance, and entertainment items. Yahoo is also reportedly the second busiest search engine behind Google, although the divide between the two is large enough to give even Ron Jeremy pause.
I think that instead of putting some ridiculous, unachievable price tag on the company, Jerry Yang should have told Yahoo's principals and shareholders a version of the following:
"Look, we want to continue being Yahoo. And, no matter what anyone wants to say about how this relationship would work, in the end, anything that is owned by Microsoft, becomes Microsoft. Well, I say that we don't want to become Microsoft. Microsoft isn't showing a whole lot of innovation right now. We want to continue to be Yahoo. We want to continue to choose our own path. We survived one of the most devastating financial periods to occur within a specific industry in history. Did we really pour all of that blood and sweat into Yahoo so that, one day, we could become nothing more than a Microsoft subsidiary?"
Unfortunately, the stock market looters, jackals, and drooling imbeciles will have the final say, which is pretty much the fate of any company that offers itself up for public purchase. It's unlikely that Jerry Yang will survive except in some diminished capacity. And, Microsoft will continue to try to create Internet properties that users don't feel like they need to take a bleach shower to feel clean afterwards.
A.J. Axline hangs out at chaos-jester.ca, and doesn't buy stock.
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Posted by
nam on 29/05/2008 11:06 |
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