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Preston Gralla's picture
Preston Gralla

Seeing Through Windows

It's time for Microsoft to give up on the Yahoo deal

The latest figures for share of the search market should convince Microsoft it's time to give up trying to buy Yahoo. Buying Yahoo won't help in the fight against Google -- it'll only weigh down Microsoft with a sinking company.

The firm hitwise just released a market study that shows that Google's share of the search market is at an all-time high, while Microsoft's and Yahoo's continues to decline. For March, Google had 67.25% of all Internet searches, compared to 20.29% for Yahoo, and 6.65% for search.msn.com.

Google's share is up from 66.44% in February. Yahoo's is down from 20.59% in February. And Microsoft's is down from 20.59% in February.

Even worse is looking at figures from a year ago. In March of 2007, Google had a 64.13% share, while Yahoo had 21.26%, and Microsoft 9.01%. So in one year, Google went up more than 3%, while Microsoft and Yahoo combined dropped a little more than 3%.

Buying a company with shrinking market share can't help Microsoft succeed online. As I've written before, buying Yahoo will divert money, resources, and attention from Microsoft. At a time when Vista is having a hard time gaining a footheld, and the stakes for Windows 7 are so high, the last thing Microsoft can afford is what in essence amounts to a hostile takeover of another company.

Instead, it should focus on Windows, and on figuring out how to make an online version of Office as a way to succeed online.

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Value to Yahoo in obtaining by Microsoft

Yahoo has a number of excellent features that appeal to a good number of its users. While I do like google for a number of reasons, I do often use yahoo for artistic or intellectual slants.
As Chairman of Nova Media Inc., we have owned commercial websites since 1994. We originally had www.nov.com, which we sold a couple years back to National Oil & Gas Vargo, those NYSE ticker symbol is NOV.
I wish I had gotten some of their stock in the final settlement though as they have done quite well. I also wish we had a link from the www.nov.com to our new site. But we did okay in the deal as we were able to eliminate all our corporate debt that was on our books.Our traffic was hurt and many surfers called us on the phone to get our new domain.
But I believe yahoo would offer some creative ideas that many of us see lacking in MSN. As an artist and a editor of creative publications on our site and amazon & barnesandnoble.com, I feel yahoo would be worth the money just to have their employees.

So you still post here...

After your previous article I thought you'd be rightfully banned from posting.

You probably asked around if someone has a spare subject to write about, along with some data attached to it to make it less irritating and more real-journalist-like.

In this case though I agree - if Microsoft wants to stay in the game it needs to lose weight, not gain some more. I could bet though they will proceed to buy Yahoo at a bid even higher than the original 31/share. Fall-out seems likely be long-term and long lasting.

I don't think it's a bad idea for MS to shoot themselves in the foot though. They are way too big for someone else to make them go down, but with their own help it's possible. That would level the field for alternatives to arrive and establish market and mind share, competitiveness will eventually lead to real improvements in software, which everyone can benefit from.

Happy bidding, MS!

Can't agree more!

I don't believe in Yahoo+MSN. It just won't work. I think they will lose even more market through that. They can't do properly their job in Windows area (vide Vista) so how will they go through this very complicated process of Yahoo & MSN merger?

Mr. Gralla, you are absolutely right, they should focus on Windows 7 as this is their biggest challenge and expectations of the market are high. Otherwise more people will buy Macs and Linux platforms.

Maybe they should buy Google instead? :)