JamieG Analysis

Recent events surrounding the Microsoft hostile takeover of Yahoo has saddened me greatly. We are about to lose a great company with a great ethic.

Yahoo’s lack lustier performance over the last 5-8 years has placed it in a very fragile position. A position companies like Microsoft will not fail to take advantage of. Either way, Microsoft will absorb Yahoo or cause it so much internal turmoil that it will slowly implode, even if the deal does not go through.

Imagine all the Emails that went out looking for Jobs. Yahoo, with a culture of Open source usage and contribution is being eyed by the company known as “The Evil Empire” where open source, stated in an internal Email by Bill Gates, is the enemy.

True to say, Microsoft may be very sincere in that it wants to inject some new blood into the company. However, this has failed time and time again as Microsoft has announced important new members joining the upper echelons of the Microsoft inner sanctum only to quietly leave 6 to 12 months later, unable to effect change.

Microsoft is a big company making a lot of money. Its business practices and profit models are simply not sustainable in a non-monopolistic environment. Until these monopolies are breached, “New Blood” that understands the less profitable Web2 business models are alienated and drummed out of Microsoft.

The real battle here is the cultural clash of Microsoft upper management with its monopolistic history and practices and the more user friendly upper management culture seen in successful Web companies.

Personally I feel, there is little hope for Microsoft getting any traction on the Internet. Microsoft is to the internet, what a convicted child molester is to your neighbourhood. If this criminal owned the only gas/petrol station in the neighbourhood, you would have to deal with him, but given a chose, you would stay away.

While Microsoft has such a dominance in computer operating systems, even with its push to make its search engine the default in Internet explorer, the default browser, it has near no presence in the search market. The internet gives you a chose here, a chose near everyone appears to go out of their way to move away from Microsoft.

Windows Live and other web tools are also very good, if not better then yahoo. But really does anyone care? Apparently they do. They choose NOT to use it.

This is Microsoft problem, and it is a problem they have failed to even show any signs of a change in character. Microsoft is seen as the rich criminal. A character that you can make astute deals with and become rich like Microsoft. But at the same time, be careful as Microsoft can turn on you and devour you as it has done so to numerous companies over the years.

Microsoft may dominate the battlefield but by no means does anyone want them to win the war.

Unfortunately Yahoo looks like becoming a casualty in this war. A minute of silence please.