Technogory

Well, interestingly enough, Microsoft is offering to purchase Yahoo! It’s difficult to take on the biggest search engine of all - Google. So, maybe this is Microsoft’s attempt to actually get their name included in the great search engine giant’s sandbox!

On the surface, it makes some sense. MSN Live Search is not a top getter. If you are a Windows desktop user, and have average Internet skills and like the standard home page that you get with any Internet Explorer - then maybe MSN Live Search is what you use. My bet is - you type google.com in your browser address bar, and search away!

Yahoo! has always been a second player - bridesmaid, but never a bride - in the search engine playground. I have to admit, I have always found the Yahoo people search to be a better product, but beyond that, the search results I get from Google are always deeper, longer, and more detailed. So, for me Yahoo! was never my first choice, and I bet it wasn’t your either.

Does this purchase offer make sense? According the the article on FoxBusiness, they are offering a deal worth about $44.6 billion. That’s quite a bit of money. Grant, it’s not all cash, but still, it’s a great deal for Yahoo! shareholders. Yahoo! declined a similar offer about a year ago - what will they do now? If I were them, given the financial climate, the decline of the dollar, and the potential hit the IT world may take if the U.S. does slide into a recession - take the money and run! Let Microsoft bear the brunt of the deal. This won’t change the landscape much - people will still gravitate to Google - that’s my opinion.

“Our lives, our businesses, and even our society have been progressively transformed by the Web, and Yahoo! has played a pioneering role by building compelling, high-scale services and infrastructure,” said Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft said in a press release announcing the offer. “The combination of these two great teams would enable us to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to our customers that neither of us would have achieved on our own.”

This type of offer, and the other waters Microsoft sticks it toe in, makes you wonder if Microsoft is on the verge of complete world dominance, or on the verge of spreading itself so thin that it begins to lose footing…this will be something to watch.