ReviewSaurus – Technology Rocks!

Yahoo Inc’s board met over the telephone on Friday and discussed strategy for getting Microsoft Corp to raise its $42 billion offer for the company and also the possibility of hiring Google Inc to run Yahoo’s search, the Wall Street Journal said. 

Jerry Yang did not particularly support the Google Alliance as such and I do believe the same as this will mean that the whole of search will move on similar algorithm as dictated by Google which is largely unfair for the users.

As Boom Town rightly noted:

“But the Google threat is just that, claim sources close to Microsoft–-a threat that is relatively empty given that it still carries with it all the monopoly issues related to Google’s dominance over the search market if struck. If Google takes over Yahoo’s search business, the thinking goes, it might as well buy the whole company, given that the regulatory headaches are the same. Google will argue, of course, that an independent Yahoo is free to pick whatever partner it wants, if it decides to outsource its search-ad business, without noting that the pickings are pretty slim.”

The Yahoo board has decided to meet all in person early next week as reported by the All Things Digital Blog. All of us were waiting eagerly that the fate of Yahoo will be decided today but I believe Microsoft have to wait a bit longer. It is very unlikely that Yahoo will have any other viable offers apart from Microsoft so I believe Yahoo will try to get Microsoft to raise its initial bid of $31 per share for it to accept it.

Microsoft has declined to comment on the question that will it raise its initial offer if Yahoo declines the initial bid. Word is around that Microsoft has to raise its bid to $37 per share to actually make it happen. Yahoo doesn’t seem to have much choice anyway.

Google doesn’t want this alliance to go through for sure as Microsoft and Yahoo together equals the majority of instant messaging and email accounts – so coming together they will have like a monopoly over the email, IM and web services. But on the other hand Google does carry an unhealthy dominance in online advertising and web searching – so we need a competition there for sure which this alliance will bring about. Merging or not merging – both has its pros and cons I believe but there is no doubt that the bid from Microsoft has come at a time when Yahoo stocks and it market share are on the fall for almost a year now – couldn’t have been a better timing and Yahoo is not left with an option I suppose – the only question is that at what price the bid will be closed?

Another area is social networking – given the amount of traffic that revolves around Microsoft and Yahoo’s email and messaging users – they can leverage that to create one of the largest socially connected audiences online, as agreed by Forrester analyst Charlene Li.

But one thing I am concerned about is that Yahoo is one of the biggest proponents of open source, while Microsoft just tends to be the opposite. Will this alliance mean that all the backend will shift to DotNet.

All I can say that we have to wait and watch, but I will put my stakes on the fact that this merge seems more likely to happen and is about to change the scene of Internet as Google did with its entry.<="News<">

Other Important Articles

• Zoho supports Google & Yahoo sign-ons – You can’t turn away from it now!
• Is Steve Ballmer Making A Bad $10 Billion Bet
• How to do better internet searches!
• Zoho Business is in! Google Apps is out!
• Yahoo Buzz Vs Digg ? Not really! It can be Yahoo YPN Vs Google Adsense!