Simply bring in someone with vision and leadership, who KNOWS the web and it’s constituents. Retire Yang and Bofstick and kick some YAHOO! butt – just too laid back, and still BLOATED with buttas, instead of minds.
I would push to see Microsoft and Yahoo form a joint venture. Microsoft would fold it’s MSN into Yahoo for a percent in the combined company. They would get a percent of board seats and a stake in the new company which would keep the name Yahoo!. Yahoo should make a play for AOL prior to a merger, before Google bought it (which they will if MSN and Yahoo merge).
I prefer Yahoo’s website over MSN. I find it more appealing. A joint venture would also save Microsoft billions of dollars they could use to invest in their other battles with Play Station 3, Wii, and Ipod. Not to mention having to pay their billion plus anti trust penelty from the European Union. They are involved in too many battles. Do they really want to spend about $43 billion dollars that will still leave them behind Google?
Yahoo needs to stop trying to be Google. I suspect they would waste a lot less money if they outsourced their search and advertising and concentrate on what they are good at.
paul…i haven’t said this since grade school but its so appropriate here…if you LOOOOOOOOVE google so much, why don’t you marry it.
wow…can you love on a company any more? the way you write your article, online advertising is 99% of the worlds GDP and everyone who is anyone MUST play in this space to make any money. newsflash paul…its a good business to be in…no doubt…but microsoft does not need to beat google in online advertising to survive. they have done something that google has yet to figure out…diversify. google, as good as they are at online advertising and i am not arguing that, is a ONE TRICK PONY…its a great trick…but its still ONE. until they can monetize their other assets, the will continue to be where they are…which isn’t a bad thing…but its not comparable to microsoft. they get a lot of ink today but the mob is fickle…and they want to see growth to support such ridiculous lofty stock prices. aside from windows and office, MS has gaming, hardware, mobile phone SW, server sw, online properties, home server/TV initiatives and telematic initiatives…all being monetized in varying degrees.
now if you wanted to suggest that yahoo needed to battle and beat google, than that makes much more sense as their business is much more closely aligned google although they have a much broader online asset portfolio but are far weaker in online search that makes up a far larger percentage of their revenues.
perspective paul…perspective.
It’s in Yahoo’s best interest to merge with Microsoft. They will not be able to compete with Google alone for much longer. If they don’t merge soon you’ll see their stock continue to fall to the point google will snap them up just to get their market share and to off a competitor.
The long term health of Yahoo!, and its very existence as an entity rely on its continued independence. If it were my company, I would fight for that continued independence up until the day the greedy activist share holder actually did manage to fire me for refusing to make the decisions that benefited his need for the biggest short term profit possible.
And no, Microsoft and Yahoo! wont catch Google in on line advertising. Do they need to?
I wouldn’t merge the two per se, rather I would absorb Yahoo into MSFT… to put the hurtin’ on Google, I would create a yahoo user “Search Lottery” that starts a randomized payoff @$100,000 US and rolls up just like a regular lottery payoff except the payoff increases as a factor of the number of searches yahoo has….