In your opinion, should yahoo have accepted Microsoft offer? Why? Why not?

If you look at anything but the stock price, a Yahoo! – Microsoft merger would have been a terrible move for Yahoo! Historically, MS has destroyed the viability of companies that they have bought. Take a look at Hotmail, which was the #1 webmail service. MS forced them to make a painful and costly migration away from an open source platform and onto Microsoft products that have made them much less reliable and secure. Now they are the #3 webmail provider.

The corporate cultures at the two companies are antithetical anyway, and the merger would have seen employees leaving in droves (which is why the management at Yahoo! immediately let their employees know they were against it).

Even if all of that weren’t true, taking #2 and #3 and making them merge won’t oust Google as the top search giant. Taking 2 inferior products and putting them together just makes a larger, but still inferior, prooduct.

From Fake Steve Jobs:

The Borg-Yahoo merger won’t work. Here’s why. It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster.

Microsoft is too big for its britches right now,,,people like yahoo or not, but it would be a bad move for those that use it

Oh, and NYT re: the stock price.

While the price has certainly dropped, YHOO stock is still trading at higher numbers than before M$ announced their takeover originally.

So, net for Yahoo! stock price overall, as of this moment (May 5th), is actually good.

no, mircosoft would just ruin yahoo

I think yahoo is already broken. They have three things of value: brand, eyeballs, and engineers.

Yahoo has broke almost everything it has aquired. Broadcast.com, launch, overture, inktomi (I think that’s misspelled, but it was a search engine that had a few properties, namely altavista)

You can argue that yahoo has not broke flickr or delicious, but then the question would be what has yahoo done with those brands? The short answer is nothing, the long answer involves stopping innovation, spending money, destroying their own services that yahoo had already spent tons on.

I wish they would merge, do something like push google harder, innovate. Microsoft needs to do something andperhaps a culture change like yahoo would be the answer.