On Feb. 1, Microsoft made a bid to take over Yahoo!. While this may seem unimportant in our regular lives, as most people reading this column aren’t likely to hold much stock in either company, it has profound implications for computer users everywhere.
Considering the tenor of the offer, it appears that Microsoft has become desperate to regain its once valued position as a company on the bleeding edge of technology.
Admittedly, the biggest reason for the offer was Microsoft’s terrible case of Google-envy. The fact is that while most people, including me, are using Microsoft software, Google is currently the lens through which the information overload is focused.
It’s Google’s search engine that everyone uses, their ads on everyone’s website, and their webmail service that people use for their personal e-mail. In fact, many people equate Google with the Internet in its entirety – a falsehood to be sure, but an important one.
Back in the 1990s, Microsoft wasn’t just a software company, it was the software company. It was its software that received the most attention, mostly because it provided the basic things that people needed: an operating system and a word processor.
People confused Microsoft for their computer manufacturer – after all, it was Microsoft’s branding that appeared most prominently when people turned on their computer. Microsoft went to extremes to protect its image, to the point of contributing greatly to the demise of Netscape as a web browser and Java as a universal programming language.
Microsoft wants this image back, and it is willing to do almost anything to get it. Given Microsoft’s history, though, the tactics it is likely to use probably won’t work.
The main problem is that there is no easy way to leverage their monopoly in the operating systems market to give it any advantage in the online advertising space, which is Google’s main business.
Sure, it could try integrating ads into the operating system again, but it didn’t work in 1998, and people are not going to pay for it now either. Prior experience may not stop Microsoft, though, as it seems far more desperate today than it has been in the past.
The biggest problem, though, is that Microsoft seems to be throwing good money after bad. While it is currently one of the richest companies in the world, its money will run out after so many expensive projects with almost no likelihood of success.
Once that happens – and it will with the way Microsoft is throwing money at its perceived mindshare problems it will – millions of computer users will have nowhere to turn when their operating systems die on them, resulting in large losses of valuable data.
Of course, I’m probably grasping at straws here, and I’ll say that quite openly. That said, I’m not too comfortable with the idea of Microsoft acquiring Yahoo. The two companies don’t fit together at all, and it is a marriage that just doesn’t make sense.
