
Microsoft Said to Be Talking With News Corporation About Joint Yahoo Bid - gibsonf1
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/10/technology/10google.html?ei=5065&en=d0335626b3163fd3&ex=1208404800&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print
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dcurtis
Why in the hell is Yahoo, all of the sudden, so valuable to Microsoft? Why
didn't they make this offer a year ago or six months ago? What prompted them
to suddenly, out of the blue, give them an unsolicited offer? And now that
they've essentially declined, why is Microsoft so eager to perform a hostile
takeover?

Also, why can no one give a straight answer to these questions?

~~~
wallflower
It's hard to answer your question. Yahoo gets a significant amount of traffic
(around 500 million users) that it doesn't _monetize_ (it's biggest problem)
as well as Google and Microsoft sees merging with Yahoo (combining pageviews
and engineering talent) as sort of a Custer's Last Stand / Alamo against the
inevitability of Google becoming the premier advertising service on the
Internet and becoming the provider of whatever supplants CPM advertising in
the future (potentially something that measures your direct influence on
people to buy products - Facebook SocialAds just the beginning - see
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=119295>)

There are a lot of _If's_

If Google contextual ads weren't like The Blob and eating up the CPMs of its
competitors

If a Microsoft merger with Yahoo managed to arithmetically combine their
traffic (pageviews to properties and more importantly, search traffic)

If Yahoo didn't start showing signs of trouble (reorgs, Jerry Yang coming
back)

If Microsoft managed to inject some of Yahoo's engineering talent (Yahoo
pipes, for example) into its organization (notwithstanding some of the premier
engineers + leaders have left/are leaving)

