--By Terry Van Horne
I'm not against the sale just my first inclination if I were a MSFT stock holder would be to sell confident that some time in the next year Mr. Softy will be 20% cheaper. The combination of Yahoo! and M$ search and ad technology is not likely because they look to be on different platforms/OS. It is more likely you'll see one or the other rolled out on both sites to start with and then a new one developed for integration into a single site.
M$ blew the Advertising platform from the get go with their broken interface and non support. Although all my clients are American because I reside in Canada the M$ rollout wouldn't let me login. You could target M$ any way you want and I would still be wary simply because I am just starting to warm to it because IME, anything coming out of Redmond should be given time to work the "bugs" out. I didn't go "windows" until the second release of IIS and .ASP. I'm just now getting comfortable with .NET
Panama is a piece o'.... that should be taken out behind the barn and put out of its misery. You could shine that turd all day and all you'd have is a shiny turd. Put Yahoo! and M$ together and all you'd have is a bigger.... Many marketers do not trust the integrity of the Yahoo! content network and ROI on Sponsored Search. It has been my personal theory that a lot of the discrepancies between click forensic reports and Googles' invalid click statements is the click forensic group reports the invalid clicks by counting all engines together and Google exploits this by reporting only their numbers, so... that does possibly account for the difference between the click forensic groups number and Google. There's a good chance both are much closer than it looks. I'd like to see the forensics groups report each engine separately... then I'd be more comfortable with the numbers from the click fraud forensics groups and SEs.
I hope M$ realizes there are potentially huge liabilities on Yahoo! books for click fraud. I opted all my clients out of the last settlement because it was a joke and literally an insult to the search marketing industry’s' intelligence. It doesn't take a computer engineers' degree to know clicks seconds apart should not be valid. IMO, that is a precedent for future litigation of the industry. IMO, at some point the SEs are going to be forced to come clean and the shite will hit the fan because there is more than a few things that make me wary of SE liabilities in the future. We are talking 10's of B's so a 2% liability on 5 or 6 years of revenue is not minimal.
I believe both the Aquantive and Yahoo! deals are about buying customers (no other way to explain the price paid for Aquantive) than technology or know how. Although, Yahoo! does have an extensive portfolio of intellectual property, it is near impossible to quantify it. Aquantive had technology, but... the price paid was more about the advertising under management and the quality of the managers. M$ needs customers and I belive they think it's easier long term to just buy them by acquiring the ad management and engineers needed for the expansion.
Combining the MSN/Yahoo! communities is a huge advantage for demographic and behavioral ad targeting, however, real savings would also come from synergy and development and network maintenance costs. Yahoo! messenger is a constant problem for me so I would welcome moving that to M$/Hotmail.
Think about it. This combined company would own most of the IM and public email categories. When you combine these networks you have the potential for some great inventory for advertisers, especially display ads so this makes huge sense on a lot of levels. IMO, this was a big piece of the puzzle which hasn't been mentioned much in the media or by either party to the sale. This could be a regulatory problem since in search the combined companies are more competive as a single unit. Google will likely shout foul at any attempts to combine these services so... I don't expect to hear much about this much before it clears all regulatory hurdles.
In search neither Yahoo! nor MS Live is going to challenge Google simply because innovation seems to come from the Universities and the graduates are pretty much choosing the Google culture over the others. Yahoo! had a chance, M$ not a hope in.... they've stifled search. IMO, M$ should just let Yahoo! take the search out of M$ and devolve the culture to that of a startup with deep pockets for growth and development.
It's obvious to me that both Yahoo! and M$ are having trouble retaining and recruiting good talent so... obviously the culture of both seem to be challenged to innovate or attract the next best thing in Search. Yahoo! was staring it in the face and didn't have the savvy to see it. Yahoo! IMO, had more than one chance to get Google and decided to go another way. Google literally stole share with the help of Yahoo! when it was providing results for Yahoo! Search.
So... as an avid Windows/M$ guy I'm not happy about this purchase. I'm convinced they paid too much and if they'd have waited a quarter or two they buy it for half what they offered. Now I will wait for the deal to close, the inevitable sell off by Yahoo! shareholders, and the resulting plunge to $22.85 where I'll be buying it with both hands!
As a believer in the premise that Google has grown to a share that is bad for the internet I applaud the seemingly late and futile attempt to stem the Google tide, but... that ship has sailed and I don't see this combination changing that much in the near term, maybe long term, but... that will take flawless execution integrating the companies.
I do see this purchase advancing the "Social", local and mobile platforms past Google but that will be short lived if they take long combining efforts in these categories. Anyone who thinks Google Apps will ever replace Office well... you put too much stock in the press that seem to hype that battle way out of proportion. I doubt Google is even on the M$ radar and with good reason... the apps are hardly an apples to apples comparison. Free is not always the best option for critical apps within an enterprise. I'll gladly pay for the convenience of answers being a phone call away.
posted @ Wednesday, February 13, 2008 6:44 AM