Today Microsoft announced a $44 bil­lion bid for Yahoo — either in a friend­ly or unfriend­ly takover trans­ac­tion. With­in min­utes twit­ter and blogs have been full of com­ments on that announce­ment — nowa­days it can be assumed that twit­ter users know the­ses things before most Yahoo employ­ees do.

Inter­est­ing­ly most com­ments in the Ger­man blo­gos­phere or the old media have come with neg­a­tive head­lines and mock­ing under­tones, like: 

“Zwei angezählte Riesen heiraten

and focused on MS/Yahoo’s posi­tion against Google. US-based reac­tions have been more pos­i­tive­ly and sig­nif­i­cant­ly more differentiated. 

For me a merg­er of MS and Yahoo would be the per­fect match. Microsoft­’s busi­ness model needs this shift towards adver­tis­ing. All at once Microsoft would gen­er­ate license fees and adver­tis­ing rev­enues. Besides — on the soft­ware side they clear­ly out­per­form Google which has tried to strength­en their licens­ing busi­ness in the last months. So I am definete­ly no Win­dows user but this mar­riage with Yahoo would trans­form an age­ing software-licensing enti­ty into a mod­ern media com­pa­ny with a solid busi­ness model.

bid jerry yang microsoft steve ballmer takeover yahoo