Microhoo!

No matter where you look in the news lately there is no way to avoid the discussion about Microsoft buying Yahoo! for $44.6 billion. What could possibly have warranted this unsolicited offer?A few weeks earlier, Yahoo! was in negotiations with Google to outsource their European seach advertising. Could Microsoft have been responding to this threat? After all, in the past couple years there have been talks about Yahoo! and Google joining forces. Not to mention the fact that if Yahoo! outsourced all of their search ads to Google they would experience an annual revenue increase of 25%.

Google has responded appropriately. They claim this merger would conflict with anti-trust laws, however many speculate that this is simply a protective reaction; Google is afraid of competition. Experts predict that the merger will be approved, although it could be delayed.

Yahoo!’s chairman Roy Bostock is an experienced advertising executive and will certainly have an idea of how to optimize the search marketing possibilities of Yahoo!. We will have to see whether this means merging with Microsoft, staying independent, or outsourcing to Google…