I couldn’t help but post something about this potential shake up in the search engine industry. Yesterday, Microsoft offered $44.6 billion to take over Yahoo and all its assets. Yahoo has yet to accept the offer and is currently wrestling with pros and cons.
Truth be told, I’ve always been a big Yahoo fan. They have been my portal homepage for over seven years and still are to this day. Although on a daily basis I use more services from Google, I still have an affection towards Yahoo.
What would a combined Yahoo / Microsoft look? Hard to say. Yahoo and Microsoft offer many of the same products related to finance, news, video, how-to, etc. Yahoo does have many brands that MSN would most likely keep including Flickr, MyBlogLog, Del.icio.us, etc. A few key questions floating around the web are what will happen to Yahoo Mail, IM, the homepage, and paid search. I hope that MSN decides to integrate into Yahoo and not vice versa. I am not and have never really been an MSN fan and it would be wise of Microsoft to keep the Yahoo brand as it is much stronger than that of MSN. In addition, Yahoo currently has nearly 20% of the search sphere, whereas MSN is hovering around 5%. Keep Yahoo, I say.