The Microsoft/Yahoo Saga Continues. Again!
By David Worthington | Monday, March 9, 2009 at 6:20 pm
Microsoft may have officially ended its bid to buy Yahoo ten months ago, but its perennial flirtations with the venerable, vulnerable Web giant persist. Kevin Turner, chief operating officer of Microsoft, said that the company was keen on establishing a partnership with Yahoo’s search business, in an interview published today in the UK-based newspaper The Times.
Turner’s comments were directed toward Carol Bartz, the new chief executive of Yahoo. Privately, Microsoft has made its intentions known to Bartz and Yahoo’s board of directors, he told The Times. In November, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer raised the possibility of a search partnership between the two companies.
Ballmer then reported met with Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock in January, and Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell sung the merits of a partnership last month.
While all of this was happening, Microsoft was gearing up for a new search push behind the scenes. The company is internally testing the next generation of Windows Live Search that it presently calls “Kumo,” according to reports.
Newsflash to both companies: A partnership is your only option. In order for either company to crawl up and tackle Google, they need to combine resources. Some analysts believe that Google’s market share may be stabilizing, but Microsoft and Yahoo aren’t gaining either. It’s high time for the companies to quit the foreplay and consummate a working relationship.
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Is Microsoft Preparing to Announce a Yahoo Search Deal? | Technologizer Says:
May 26th, 2009 at 7:34 pm[…] flow of traffic to Bing. A deal with Yahoo would be a means to those ends, and it has repeatedly been on the table for […]
March 9th, 2009 at 8:51 pm
This whole Microsofthoo! thing is getting completely long-in-the-tooth and out of hand. How long can they keep beating around the bush? It seems like a bad case of left hand doesn’t know what right hand is up to.
On the business side, however, what would happen if these two companies joined forces with a partnership or a buyout? What would they combine? It would need to be decided which search engine tech will be used – Microsoft’s or Yahoo’s! and then all future improvements/changes will be made to that platform. I don’t think, however, that either company is willing to dumb its search technology and adopt the other’s. If both companies couldn’t even sit down and talk business and discuss a partnership/merger/acquisition, how could they be expected to make bigger decisions such as which search engine tech to unify on? They should both just quit the search engine business and leave it to the company that does it best – Google. It will be interesting to see how Mahalo will play into search in the future as well.