Microsoft have bid to buy Yahoo!

[rob]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7222114.stm

Will they be allowed though?

[Tom]

Probably, they will be allowed. My view, possibly based on the history of British Leyland, is that when two sinking ships are bolted together they will sink faster.

[David]

Surely, Rob's question should read "Why would they want to?".

Yahoo! have never found a niche and instead of doing something innovative, they constantly play catch-up.

I'm guessing that MS may feel that an amalgamation between the Live and Yahoo! search engines may just start to look like an undersized contender to Google search.

[Tom]

The editor of PCW says http://blogs.pcworld.com/techlog/archives/006426.html "Microsoft obviously wants a better shot of getting a bigger slice of the Web advertising pie which Google is cheerfully gorging on these days. The merger might give the company that opportunity. And as much as I like much of what Google does, I also like the idea of it facing strong competition--which, since both Microsoft and Yahoo are kinda challenged online, it doesn't really have right now."
And here's a prediction from another PCW writer: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,142114/article.html# "It's the year 2010. Microsoft owns Yahoo and has just changed the name of Flickr to Microsoft Flickr Live Photo-Sharing Service for Digital Camera Enthusiasts. The service is still free, but Windows Vista users will have to validate their copy of Vista as "genuine" first to use it."

[Tom]

For my thoughts, exactly, see http://techland.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/02/01/microsofts-aol-or-microhoo/

[Tom]

I've been reading more about the deal and now have another thought. It seems that MS have invested heavily in server farms, which is where some people think Google's true expertise lies, and now have spare capacity - because MS live did not grow as expected. So they want to buy Yahoo's enviable collection of 'eyeballs' and exercise them in MS's farming enterprise.