Yahoo/Microsoft merger/takeover (Re: thread policy)

[Max Battcher]

Ronn! Blankenship wrote:
> (So, for Max and others who have had such 
> experiences, do you think that Yahoo! will 
> improve if/when Micro$oft finally gets hold of 
> them?  Or is this one of those rhetorical-type 
> questions which also qualifies as a stupid question?  :P)

It's a fair question but I don't know an easy answer.  But I get a kick 
out of playing armchair economist, so excuse me if I ramble a little 
about it...

There are the many pessimists that shout to the rooftops that Microsoft 
would immediately gut Yahoo, but that doesn't happen in the real 
world...  There's usually a transition period and generally the idea is 
to maximize profits by minimizing losses (obvious tautology I know, but 
one that seems easy to forget) and you don't money by taking the entity 
you just bought and telling some its most valuable assets to go home and 
shutting down what pathways it has in place to generate money.

I have a suspicion that a Yahoo taken over by Microsoft is more likely 
to look like today's Yahoo than a Yahoo that attempts to remain the same 
and battle it out as they are now.  I think that Yahoo is near something 
of an "innovate or die" cusp, and the way the market looks today the 
easiest the thing to do is fail and die.  The internet is an extremely 
harsh world to compete in...  particularly when you are dependent on ad 
revenue.

The easiest comparisons that I can make is with Hotmail, which is one of 
Microsoft's groups in the Bay Area and so "geographical sibling" to 
Yahoo should Yahoo be acquired by Microsoft.  It seems to me that 
Hotmail has seen steady improvement since Microsoft bought it, even as 
it has been mostly re-branded to "Live Mail" in the last few years (for 
greater overall 'brand meshing')...  You might argue that Hotmail moved 
from the innovator's hot seat to the backseat over the years, but I 
think that is something that may have happened anyway (the internet's 
winds of innovation change fast and often).

>>>> which seems a shame.  I would assume that you could easily adapt one from
>>>> Thunderbird's source...
>
> [Primarily in response to Max:]  That of course 
> ass/u/mes that Jon is a programmer rather than a 
> turnkey end-user, and from his questions in this 
> thread it is obvious that he is much closer to the latter than the former.

I realized that.  I mentioned the "hard solutions" only as potential 
impetus for some kindly soul that reads this list to maybe convert a 
hard solution into an easy one...

--
--Max Battcher--
http://www.worldmaker.net/