I’ll continue to use Google on my Macintosh.

I haven’t used Yahoo since… well… finding out about Google.

In entrepreneurship and strategic management an exit strategy, exit plan, or strategic withdrawal, is a way to terminate either one’s ownership of a company or the operation of some part of the company. Entrepreneurs and investors devise ways of recouping the capital they have invested in a company. The most common strategy is simply to sell their equity position to someone else. From time to time, management may decide it is necessary to downsize its operations. This typically involves discontinuing less profitable brands, products, product lines, or operating divisions.

Yahoo!’s been having some hard times recently, no doubt about that, so this offer could be considered an exit strategy to get them out of their situation.

The one and only reason why Google is popular is simple: homogeneity. It reinforces the power of the brand and the usability.

It may be the only solution for Yahoo employees to survive but will inevitably fail completely in terms of competition

Anyway, in the first half of my comment, point number 2, I meant to say that the only property that M$ might keep is Upcoming. There’s a possiblity that they might keep Flickr, but I really believe that their heavy marketing of the Windows Live service, which already has a photo sharing service, would spell doom for Flickr.

1) M$ is invested in M$, meaning that any acquistions that they make, no matter how successful they’ve been before acquisition, will be made to transition all code to .NET/Silverlight/M$ Javascript…..no more compatibility with Firefox, Safari or Opera.

2) The ONLY reason that M$ is even looking at Yahoo! is because of the marketshare that Yahoo! has in search…..it could give a rats a$$ about the rest of Yahoo!’s properties. Therefore: Flickr=Gone, Yahoo Mail=Gone, Yahoo Chat=Gone, Yahoo Web Hosting=Gone. Probably the only properties they might keep is Upcoming and Flickr, but in the cases of those properties please see point 1 above.

3) As previously stated, M$ has a horrible trackrecord at monetizing its web properties (beyond Hotmail which was already pretty well entrenched in the email market). It’s hard to see Microsoft being able to make any headway with Yahoo!’s search market because, as I already stated, they’re just going to go under the hood and completely replace all code with M$/.NET/IE specific code. Most folk who search heavily are using Firefox and Opera and when they see that M$/Yahoo! search isn’t working correctly in their preferred browser, they are going to bounce right on back to Google……which is really the opposite of what M$ wants.

Now if you ask me what M$ should have done was make a quiet inquirery into purchasing Yahoo instead of blowing things up out of proportion like they did today. A quiet, non-noisy buyout means that no ones the wiser as to who’s really pulling the strings of Yahoo……therefor people don’t start making migration plans AWAY from Yahoo! to avoid the M$ acquisition curse and you don’t tip your hat to your mortal enemy (Google) as to what you’re trying to do in the forseeable future.

In my mind, the company that should be trying to buy Yahoo and strengthen it’s position in the Tech world is Amazon. They, like M$, crashed and burned trying to enter the search market. However, they’ve got ten+ years experience with monetizing web-based business and are in a better position to fortify Yahoo! during the coming rough years of the economy due their creation of AWS. The best reason though why they should buy Yahoo (or at least entertain the thought of a merger) is because beyond AWS, Kindle and Amazon.com, Amazon really has no other business’ or web properties to stand on. Imagine if they bought Yahoo!:

1) Top notch intergration of Flickr and Upcoming and Yahoo Mail with Kindle.

2) Intergration of Amazon.com and del.icio.us allowing one to easily bookmark and share wishlist items from the store.

3) Intergration of Yahoo! Search with Amazon.com allowing for faster results.

4) Intergrating Yahoo! Chat with Amazon.com allowing for friends and family to chat in real time about items in the store.

5) Increased revenue from Yahoo!’s solid Ad network.

The possibilities are endless and the level of innovation that would come woould be amazing…..

In one way, Yahoo is struggling and really needs a heavyweight partner such as Microsoft. Looking the other way I also question why Microsoft has been unable to increase market share in search. Do They really have to invest $40+ billion to acquire a ~15-20% share?

I agree about pressuring Google. They are dominating the internet right now, but without a formidable opponent they eventually will stagnate. I guess I will reserve some of my other thoughts for when this deal is decided one way or the other.

Yahoo!, please don’t!!!

Adam – I have to disagree with you regarding both Lionhead and Bungie. Lionhead is head strong into the development of Fable 2 with constant interaction with the community, and Halo… I don’t think you can call Halo 2 and Halo 3 a failure just because they weren’t on a Mac.

[no innovation] x 2 = no innovation

But that someone is not Microsoft. My bet is that they’re going to re-brand and re-market the sites and traffic will go down the tubes. If you look at their track record, Microsoft has never been very good at content generation or monetization of free services. I don’t think that this will change in the next few years.

The complete list of acquisitions made by Microsoft since 1994.
Lionhead Studios seems to have stalled their game output, Bungie Software stopped making Mac games (Halo 1 has been ported- any guess when 2 or 3 will arrive). Hotmail is ugly, buggy, and no damn good on anything other than IE. Multimap has yet to be fiddled too much with, but give them time.

Simply put, MS seem to be the touch of death for innovation, so Yahoo! + Microsoft, not good, particularly for the Flickr brand.