Yahoo, Take 2
Last week Steve Ballmer made fun of Yahoo. Reports of a Microsoft takeover of Yahoo went viral in 2007, before the Wall Street and banking meltdown: "You ask any CEO who might have bought something before the market crashed in 2008, 'Would you be glad that you didn't buy something'? Hallelujah! Everything else aside, the market really kind of fell apart. If you think about the timing, if Yahoo had accepted our bid...we would have closed post Lehman Brothers."
Those sentiments aside, it appears that Microsoft may once again be interested in the former search giant (since Yahoo search is actually powered by Bing, I'd put Yahoo's search share at zilch).
Now reports are surfacing that once again that Redmond is knocking at Yahoo's door.
But not so fast. Apparently Google is also yearning for Yahoo and is trying to put a group of companies together to buy it, much like how AOL and Sun bought Netscape years ago.
I'm not sure what is left of Yahoo -- search is gone but there is still news, IM, mail and some voice.
In the end it is all about market share. Yahoo still has eyeballs and registered users that equal money in the bank.
Google and Microsoft would both run into an antitrust backlash -- though I'm not sure which company the government would go after the hardest.
What is your take? Spill at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 10/26/2011 at 1:18 PM