What Do You Make of MS Bidding for Yahoo?

There is a lot in the news about Microsoft trying to buy yahoo. I have a few thoughts on the whole thing, not that I'm going to draw a lot of attention, but have you seen the latest comstock numbers? Now, I am not saying that I'm old. But I know when Google commanded a much larger share of the searches - 10% more? Do you remember?

Of course, I also remember the days when myspace was not considered a powerful traffic generating tool that out performed MSN.

You need to remember that MSN may have a small piece of the pie, but their 'decision to buy' ratio has made them a 'must' for ecommerce and shopping cart based businesses.

What I find as 'sad' is that Yahoo's generosity started Google. Yes, that is right. If it wasn't for Yahoo we'd have no Google.

Remember 2002? Yahoo bought Inktomi, a search engine, for $235 million and then went after Overture which disappeared from cyberspace for a cool $1.6 billion.

Of course - they really slipped up when they failed to realize that kids could drive facebook into a phenom! This was probably the beginning of the end.

Will I be upset if MS buys Yahoo? You bet. I tried using Google search today and had to go 10 pages back to get sites that had anything to do with my topic - not a closely related product for sale. I went over to Yahoo and found what I needed on page 1. I also don't need to let Yahoo store up to 10g of marketing information on my c:// - tracking every key stroke and website I visit.

I am proud of Yahoo for holding out - demanding that Google pay 'fair price' for the Golden Goose. Yes, because as the net grows, and as the users become more savvy, I believe they will start learning to hack Google and get 'out of its clutches' - when they do - they'll have no other choice than to go to Yahoo.