Microsoft makes $44.6 billion bid for yahoo!

The bid made jaws drop everyplace. Still, it shouldn't have surprised anyone, given Microsoft's 18-month-long on-again, off-again effort to spouse with or acquire Yahoo. It leave of absence the rest of us request two inquiry: what are the deal's implications? And will it really go through?

My first reaction when I heard the buzz about the deal was that there hasn't been this much fuss about a potentiality merger since AOL acquired Time Charles Dudley Warner for $182 one million million back in 2001. Surely, there hasn't been another Internet deal that big since then. It would be the biggest deal in Microsoft's history, dwarfing the previous record-holding $6 one million million purchase of aQuantive.

That's all the more ground we should take a close look at this deal. You know every Yahooligan is doing so. Some of them are shuddering. Others, according to a remark on a vale Wag story, are vowing to stay and work to make any cultural changes to the organisation "as painful as possible for the new Microsoft directors and division Veeps, short of rebellion." I'll have more on that point of view in a bit.

If you have to ask why Microsoft is doing this, although, you haven't been paying attention to the hunt arena since Google entered it. In a press release on its web site, Microsoft notes that "The online advertising marketplace is growth at a very fast pace, from over $40 one million million in 2007 to about $80 billion by 2010…Today this marketplace is progressively dominated by one participant." That one participant is Google, which by some estimates garners two-thirds of hunt traffic, departure Yahoo and Microsoft with a combined paltry 28 percentage of the marketplace.

Microsoft clearly wants a piece of that pie, and its own attempt haven't enabled it to secure the space. So it is turn to the embattled veteran in the field, hoping to capture that magic and develop some synergies that will help it defeat big bad Google. Anybody who automatically thinks a deal this big, between two companies so different, will give you great synergies didn't learn any lessons from the AOL-Time Warner merger I mentioned earlier. The most polite word I've heard to refer to that deal recently was "disaster." And it was trumpeted at the time as the creation of a major media powerhouse combining old and new. Will "Microhoo" or "Yacrosoft" be any different?