I’ve been using Yahoo! since before they were a company, since they were a hostname at Stanford.edu. Yahoo! Mail has been a faithful old standby for me for years. Even when I was paying for Apple’s .Mac services, including email, for about five years, I still had the rock of Yahoo! as a fallback. Once I got into Google’s Gmail, I realized I couldn’t justify paying Apple a yearly fee when I could get more and better service for free from online sources. So while Gmail has become my most important personal email tool, I still depend on, and trust, Yahoo! Mail for most of my online contacts.
For search, I primarily use Google, like most people, and occasionally use Yahoo! search, either by accident or because I want a different perspective. I never use Microsoft for web search, because the results usually don’t get me where I want to go. It doesn’t matter.
When Microsoft announced its unsolicited bid for Yahoo!, my first reaction was dread. Such a merger of giants very rarely works, rarely delivers the promised shareholder value (disclosure: I do not own shares of any of them), and rarely benefits consumers. This isn’t just my observation – there’s a lot of factual support to be found via places like Tom Peters and Oligopoly Watch.
I have been contemplating for some time moving all my email to Google, and therefore changing contact and login information for some 300 sites where I currently use my Yahoo! info. A successful bid from Microsoft to buy Yahoo! would have hastened that decision and migration. Now that Microsoft has walked away from the bid, I am leaning more toward bailing out anyway, but at a more leisurely pace.
When the bid was first revealed, I read so much speculation on the web about the probability of the acquisition going through and about whether that was a good or bad thing for either company. By March, nearly everything I read from industry insiders all over the web was that the acquisition was inevitable, that Yahoo! would be forced to succumb, that Microsoft really badly needed Yahoo! and their search advertising business, etc. Now that the news is out that no deal will be made, the rampant majority opinion seems to be that Yahoo! is now doomed, walking away was the smartest thing Microsoft could do, etc. I hope that Yahoo! can fix their problems and that Microsoft can deliver on their promise to compete and innovate because I want to see all three – Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! – remain healthy and strong and competitive, each in their own way. Fight it out in the open market. I think that’s good for business and good for consumers.
