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Suggested Predictions
Ziibos (27)
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It is not a rumor this time. Microsoft has offered to buy the search engine company Yahoo for $44.6b in cash and shares. Yahoo has been struggling in recent years to compete with Google, which has also been a competitor to Microsoft. If Yahoo accepted the offer, competition authorities both in the US and the European Union would be likely to investigate the tie-up.
Comments (13)
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What has not been talked about is that a successful merger can potentially violate some anti-trust laws in the States. Competition will definitely use that to prevent the deal from happening. And, to be perfectly honest, MS acquiring Yahoo would not give itself an edge over some of the chief competitions it wants to take down.
a BW article, dated May 4, 2007, talked about "Microsoft + Yahoo = ?" - it was the first time report about the potential buy-out. Microsoft was feeling increasing pressure to compete with Google (GOOG), which planned to beef up its portfolio with a $3.1 billion purchase of online advertising company DoubleClick. Among bloggers on the Net, there is plenty of skepticism about a merger because of the size of the deal, the differences in culture, the abundance of executive egos, and the redundancies in technology. "If Microsoft buys Yahoo, Microsoft should immediately spin the Yahoo-MSN business out as a separate company," says Henry Blodget, the one-time analyst at Merrill Lynch (ML), who now writes the Internet Outsider blog. "If it doesn't, both Yahoo and MSN will die." (see BusinessWeek.com, 5/4/07, "Yahoo, MSN "Will Die"").