AllenHsieh.com

It’s been a week since Microsoft offer $45 billion USD to buy Yahoo. They said in the news that Yahoo’s board of directors already met to discuss their options, though no words yet as to what they plan to do.

If the decision was mine and mine alone to make, I’d say losing Yahoo to Microsoft is a definite no. Staying independent is what I’d pursue above all (even after Steve Ballmer has already said that the Yahoo brand will live on…) Many people are saying that outsourcing search advertising to Google is cutting off a long term growth opportunity and that is equally bad. But I don’t really think so. First of all, I never see Yahoo as the same kind of company as Google is anyway. Google is first and foremost a search engine. It’s also quickly becoming a web application service provider. Yahoo on the other hand has always been a portal and a web destination, providing news, sports, finance and content in other areas. We’re talking about a search engine vs. online media company. It’s always been apple and orange!

If not for that Yahoo is a public company and public companies are always under ridiculously heavy pressure to find growth every year, I’d say Yahoo is just fine as it is. They never really needed to compete with Google head-to-head to begin with. Yahoo can generate a lot of revenue from online advertising with its huge user base and pageviews. I never get the notion that you’d have to be in search to grab the online advertising market. That Google needed to buy up DoubleClicks and that Yahoo is already good at display advertising say enough to me on this topic.

But anyway, Yahoo is already a public copmany and needs to make sure its share price doesn’t continue falling. And since they are a public company, rejecting both Microsoft’s offer (with a high premium) and Google’s partnership idea (with a high immediate pay-out) is not an option, either. Some morons will for sure sue the board of directors for failing their duty to maximize shareholder value. (Whatever…)

Which brings me back to the options they are facing right now. I’d take Google’s money and hand over search. That’d give Yahoo the chance to focus on what they do well and buy time to bounce back. It shouldn’t stop there of course. If they did partner up with Google, they’d have to find a new direction for its long term growth strategy. But I think they’d be just fine…

It’s funny that I’m rooting for a Yahoo-Google partnership and not a Yahoo-Microsoft merger. I’m rather anti-Google these days… (This is not to say I necessary like Microsoft though.) But of course, my sentiments don’t have any bearing on what I actually use. Here’s a list of web applications/services and who I use:

E-mail: Google (Gmail)
IM: Microsoft (Windows Live Messenger)
BSP: Microsoft (Windows Live Space) and my own
Search: Google
Web Startup Page: Yahoo (My Yahoo!)
SNS: Facebook