It's the metaphors and similes that get me. It's a shotgun marriage, declared one commentator, 'with Google holding the gun'. Putting Microsoft and Yahoo together, said another, was like trying to produce an eagle from an alliance of two turkeys.Posted by jez at February 11, 2008 8:35 AM | Subscribe to this site via RSS:T his is unfair. Microsoft isn't a turkey, but a profitable, boring mastodon that entertains fantasies about being able to fly. Yahoo, for its part, is an ageing hippy who invented hang- gliding but aspired to fly 747s and then discovered that he wasn't very good at it. The mastodon hopes that by employing the hippy it will learn to hang-glide. The hippy's feelings about the whole deal are plain for all to see.
Microsoft's $44.6bn offer of cash plus shares for Yahoo has got everyone in a spin, partly because of its sheer size but mostly because they fondly imagine it heralds an exciting future. At last, they think - something that might stop the inexorable advance of Google toward world domination! If that's what they're hoping for, then this ain't it, alas. This isn't the opening of a new chapter in the history of the computing business, but - as John Markoff observed in the New York Times - 'the final shot of yesterday's war'. And even if the merger does take place in a reasonable timescale - and if it can be made to work - it won't make much of a dent in Google.
