Microsoft and Yahoo finally tied a knot, but not the knot that Yahoo shareholders have long yearned for. The new-economy giants inked a 10-year Web search deal in a bid to take on Google. Google shares barely budged but Yahoo’s sank more than 6 percent as the deal stopped short of combining display advertising businesses.
Back when this deal was all the rage, it was a story of egos. Then Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang was ultimately thrown out for not getting a deal done. Veteran agitator Carl Icahn was in top form, blasting Yahoo from the Street. Now under the new management of Carol Bartz, expectations were slowly rising that a broader deal might get done.
The question now is whether the market that had for so long hoped for a big deal will see this one as at least a step in the right direction.
Trackback
2 comments so far
Missed the point here - the REAL question is do we as consumers want this deal to which I answer a resounding NO. I do not want my searches continually tied up with these two over-sized ego-driven enterprises. I don’t want my searches tied in with “what is popular” or what pays the site most money. I demand to be treated as an individual - not everyone searching with similar strings is searchng for the same results. This is why I shall continue to use multi-search engines such as Metacrawler and Dogpile (which include Yahoo in their searches). Am I the only person on this planet who has NOT made MSN or Yahoo or Bingo the “home page / major search engine”??
- Posted by LarryToo little, too late. Decades of defective Microsoft software coupled to Yahoo on life support is hardly game-changing. Neither one of these companies does ANYTHING better than Google. Bets are on that Carol is going to pull a Carly-HP implosion anyway, and MS will buy up the pieces for pennies on the dollar 3-4 years down the line.
- Posted by Mike Mee Gagg