Big online merger for dummies

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Big online merger for dummies

Microsoft��s bid to acquire Yahoo is a Pandora��s box yet to be opened by Bill Gates. Little does he realise that by acquiring Internet firm Yahoo, he wants to take control of something, which is not in his traditional hunting territory.

CJ: Debby A

Fri, Feb 22, 2008 13:24:45 IST

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Some of you must have heard that Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo at 44.6 billion dollars – roughly the cost of three modern aircraft carrier fleet – to beat rival Google into a banana peel like substance, so that Google doesn’t bounce back into the Internet market, and if it did, limp back with crutches and bandages.

The potential merger of the creator of Windows with the firm that taught us things like ‘lol’ and ‘:P’ is seen by many as an affair of interest only to accountants and subversive bow-tied stock traders. The current descendants of homo sapiens don’t care whether Yahoo acquiesces to the unsolicited bid by Bill Gates’ brainchild firm.

But their ignorance will soon end after the merger – if it happened – when their mails start to fly to the wrong inboxes and the customer care replies “Fill this form and mail it to Microsoft” instead of “Hi! How may I help you?”

Although the talk of the town is the acquisition bid to Yahoo, the concern of the town has more to do with mundane things like the future of Yahoo employees, things like whether Microsoft’s ‘rigid’ workers could eat together in the same canteen with the ‘child-like’ Yahoos.

Some people have even compared this merger with the acquisition of Time Warner by America Online (AOL) in 2000. But clear the cobwebs of thy neighbours lest they be ridiculed in a cocktail party by the intelligentsia. AOL had to beg, borrow and steal 164 billion dollars to buy Time Warner – about three and half times more than Microsoft’s stingy bid.

Microsoft’s otherwise normal bid was termed as a ‘hostile bid’ overnight. Nobody knows how that word crept in. But the term makes perfect sense because Microsoft may simply bypass the whole Yahoo board and approach shareholders who want to make money faster than the speed of light.

So what’s Microsoft doing? Some say it is how business works. One has to keep buying rival firms to reach the top. But others also see Microsoft’s bid as simply what we call the ‘gentleman bully behaviour’. A gentleman bully is a nice-hearted old man, who, because of age and boredom, takes pleasure in the misfortune of others.

A circular doing the rounds of the Yahoo headquarters had its CEO Jerry Yang writing every sentence and people’s names in small caps, like chatting to a ‘fellow sitting in the next cubicle’. But Bill Gates maintains a small group of friends and those handful few say he is most of the time “cut off from the rest of us. ”

So the merger will have two fundamentally different, and perhaps incompatible, characters jostling for an upper hand. Sadly, Jerry’s dilemma was not earned but thrust upon him.

Next to a problematic online advertisement campaign, the other area where Microsoft will slip in the post-merger period is in the search engine segment. Microsoft’s strength is in its software products. Bill Gates is where he is now because of Windows, and by acquiring Internet firm Yahoo, he wants to take control of something, which is not in his traditional hunting territory.

“People want to have an impact, and it’s hard to make an impact when you’re being hired as employee number 90,000,” a Microsoft guy told the New York Times.

The merger is about money, all right, but in the end, as in human nature, greed will eventually prevail and people will one day look back and say “We miss Yahoo!”

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