Microsoft wants to aquire Yahoo! for $50 billion. Yahoo! has a lot of great products under its wing, notably Flickr, del.icio.us, Auctions, Finance, advertising and Mail.
But I do not want Microsoft to acquire Yahoo! at all! Imagine all the lost in competition. Currently the competition is among Microsoft, Google and Yahoo!. If they were to be together, it’s just one less competitor.
And Yahoo! is probably too big a company to gobble. They’d take years to completely acquire and integrate Yahoo! into the rest of Microsoft products. Eventually this acquistion may even set both companies back.
What Microsoft (and Yahoo!) should be doing is a partnership and more promotions. Make things work faster and build better interfaces.
Microsoft:
- your MSN Spaces is still quite crappy
- your Live Hotmail still needs to look better, compare Yahoo!
- your Virtual Earth product isn’t as cool as Google’s
- your search engine still needs to be improved a little
- you bloody need an RSS program that is online and integrated with Live products
- your Live ID program seems to be losing traction
- your calendar needs to learn a bit or two from Google
- you need to compete with Google with your the Office documents
- please look at del.icio.us and then look at your Windows Live Favorites, it’s more fun using del.icio.us
- you need to cross promote your software like what Google did
- stop working on Windows Live Mail Desktop, use concentrate on Live Hotmail
- you need to allow more publishers in your advertising program.
Microsoft, you don’t need to acquire Yahoo!, just work on your web applications and brush them up. I find myself using lesser and lesser of your products. I’m always willing to give your products a try, but a lot of your products aren’t too inspiring. There are some startup companies that does thing better than you do.
I portray Google and Yahoo! as much cooler companies. Your Windows Live brand isn’t cool at all. Tip: change all your products to LiveMail, LiveLinks, LiveSpaces, LiveReader, LiveEarth and whatever. Drop the Windows word, it’s boring. I applaud names such as Silverlight, that’s a fantastic start.
In the meantime, I’ll go back to using Gmail and Google Earth.
[Oh by the way, Wall Street Journal has reported that the Microsoft-Yahoo talks of a possible acquistion is no longer active.]