Microhoo – The rumored Microsoft takeover of Yahoo

UPDATE: This is no longer a valid rumor anymore. There's nothing going on between Yahoo and Microsoft. Don't blame me, blame the WSJ and NY Post. I feel sorry for the investors though when the stock price dips -36% on Monday for YHOO...well not that sorry.

This is going to be a very interesting weekend. What exactly would Microsoft gain by acquiring Yahoo?

Yahoo owns among many things the worlds most popular photo sharing site, Flickr. It just acquired Right Media and a very popular blog widget company MyBlogLog. Of course who can forget del.icio.us and a whole plethora of acquisitions dating back to 1997.

Microsoft has well...MSN then there's Live.com. Most of the world runs an Operating System that they make and oh yes they also have Tellme which they recently acquired.

Put them all together in one basket and you have the second largest online ad space seller in the world, the largest portal provider, the largest photo sharing and bookmarking services and some stiff competition for Google. Basically the only way a monopolistic company can go forward and keep its monopoly is to re-monopolize itself in areas where it couldn't get headway by acquiring everything around it in a new monopoly...whew! That's a lot of monopoly.

The rumored price to get that stage - $50 Billion.

So if this did indeed happen and MSFT and YHOO became MSYH then GOOG could get a little shaky.

The real deal

Microsoft knows it's losing the online battle, it can't innovate enough to keep itself in competition to Google and Yahoo combined. So their next bet is to buy out the company which is the next best thing and gain some of the traction, that they so far have been losing, back. Google will definitely not sell themselves out, but Yahoo is a company that might be ready to sell itself at the right price.

Only time will tell how this plays out and whether the deal does actually go through?

Related posts:

1. Microsoft Photosynth – In Live Labs
2. MyBlogLog acquired by Yahoo
3. Search Engine Ranking Check
4. Freebies
5. Google & You Tube