Microsoft, Yahoo Finalize Search Agreement 77
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the keeping-up-with-the-googses dept.
from the keeping-up-with-the-googses dept.
Joe Quimby writes "Microsoft and Yahoo have finalized and executed their Web-search agreement after five months of deliberation, the companies announced Friday. Microsoft and Yahoo reached a revenue-sharing agreement in July to combine their search businesses. Under the 10-year agreement, Yahoo's Web search would be powered by Bing and Yahoo would retain most ad revenue from its site."
Reclamation of infrastructure (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd love to know what's going to become of all of the servers/networking gear that used to power yahoo search. Doubt they'll reformat and install windows/BING on them.
Re:Have I misunderstood (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, to be fair, Google did actually complain about that [infoworld.com] in 2006...
Re:10 years is a LOOOOOOOOONG time... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually I think MSFT has brilliantly pulled the wool over everyone's eyes with the whole Yahoo Search deal. While I agree with you wholeheartedly that MSFT WILL end up buying Yahoo I do NOT believe it is about search at all, and they are (quite brilliantly) getting everyone to focus on search because even with both combined they will get a much smaller piece of the pie than Google, thus making it less likely to get the regulators screaming.
So what IS it about, you ask? Two words: Web Mail. Last I checked Yahoo was THE #1 Web Mail provider in the USA, and many Asian countries Yahoo Mail is also #1 or a close #2. This will give MSFT tons of data to mine, more ways to push MSFT technology into the cloud and score more customers (Edit Documents sent to you through Yahoo Mail with our new Office Live!) and when combined with the numbers from Yahoo and Live Messenger the deal will give MSFT probably more persistent daily eyeballs than even Google, when the services are added together.
Ultimately I believe Yahoo will be bought by MSFT, and with everyone focused on search there won't be nearly as big a stink as if they let it be known that Mail and Messenger were their real goals, which would give them #1 status as Web Mail provider, and probably #1 on combined instant messaging. So I wouldn't make fun of MSFT too much of they manage to pull this off. It shows that after the Vista debacle they are starting to think long term and are trying to map out a long term strategy to map themselves out a serious chunk of the cloud. If they do manage to get everyone focused on search and get Yahoo acquired without major regulator hassle I would have to give them credit for a move well played. Hell I would say it is a move almost worthy of Darth Gates himself.
Re:Two irrelevants joining will remain irrelevant (Score:4, Interesting)
You're simplifying this all too much.
First, because trying to be the leader in search was never really Yahoo's game. They were about being a web portal -- basically, they wanted to be your home page. Personally, I prefer a clean home page for searching like Google's, and I suspect a lot of the people who read Slashdot do too, but an awful lot of people don't.
To that end they went after a lot of different things. Webmail, video, fantasy sports leagues, photo hosting (Flickr), games, news, etc. I'm not saying that's necessarily been a winning strategy for them as a company, but what they were trying to do was never strictly about search.
Microsoft, too, has a very multi-pronged business plan, even for the web. Sure, we've seen their mostly unsuccessful efforts in the search, web portal, webmail, and instant messenging areas, but there's also IE, ASP.NET, Silverlight, and too many other things to count, to say nothing of all the more indirect efforts like the XBox which start to bleed back over into the online space. In a lot of these areas they've taken on more successful established players or technologies and fought to gain market share, something that's been good for everyone since it's forced those established options to become better to stay ahead. Microsoft is the kind of company that will try to compete in a hundred different arenas, knowing that someone else might falter and that, even if not, maybe you can still make something good out of being #2 in a couple related areas.
Re:Not the first time (Score:1, Interesting)
Yes, they used Inktomi for a long time. And then they bought Inktomi and continued to use the search untill now I think. Yahoo was also one of the initial investors in Google, to make sure there were search engines available to power their search.