Common Sense eCommerce

The big buzz in eCommerce this week is the Microsoft proposed acquisition of Yahoo! If you haven’t read about it, you’ve not been reading the news, but here is the story. 

How to acquire a company that doesn’t want to be acquired? Make them an offer they can’t refuse and wave the money in the front of the investor’s faces so the board can’t say no. In reality, this deal seems to make a lot of sense given the fact that Yahoo’s future is somewhat uncertain as a media company. Microsoft, not happy with their long standing 3rd place status in the search engine media market will benefit. So it looks like a win win.

Here is a MarketWatch article that sounds the alarm about the culture difference between Microsoft and Yahoo! Indeed, Microsoft is not a media company like Yahoo!, rather, they’re a software company with a media division. The article draws up the example of the AOL / Time Warner merger a number of years ago. That turned out to be a culture clash of gargantuous proportions. I’m not sure the MS/Yahoo will be quite that bad, but it’s something to consider.

And then there’s that pesky issue of the Brand. Will Microsoft keep the Yahoo! name? Will they drop that annoying “!” at the end?

Tags: yahoo, microsoft, Yahoo Microsoft, Microsoft Yahoo Acquisition

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