Personal Bytes

I must say, I’ve been following this closely but I’m actually more interested in the reactions from within Yahoo employees than Microsoft’s panacea for finally beating up Google.

This clearly seems to me like a shot blowing back to Microsoft in the mid-term. First off, Yahoo employees seem clearly pissed off, as they don’t share Microsoft’s culture. Yahoo! has been a very open-minded company while Microsoft is the typical “buy them or smash them”. Yahoo has been living in the same ecosystem as Google or AOL and still making profits, while Microsoft’s strategy does not include sharing but rather world domination. Is Google making a lot of money from something Microsoft never had a single clue about? Doesn’t matter, let’s smash them.

Furthermore, there are tons of logistical and strategical actions that will have to be carried on to proceed with a merger, including laying off people and devise new work plans. That means tons of hours wasted just for planning the deeds, lest having it running full-throttle.

As for everyone else, it will be devastating. Yahoo is a huge player and diminishing competition in the world wide web is only as good as how many shares you hold from Microsoft. Apart from the shareholders, everyone else will feel the pain of submerging to another attempt of monopoly.

And one last bit. Will current Yahoo users migrate to Microsoft services (considering they won’t keep Yahoo Mail and Hotmail, Flickr and Spaces, etc..) or will they simply hmm.. migrate to Google?

Kevin Kelleher puts it this way:

“A 62 percent premium, hmmm –- we Yahoo users have a new choice: Learn to love life under Ballmer, or migrate to Google.”

Let us hope this will fail and the Fed/European Commission block it. We like Yahoo as it is.