Microsoft Offers $44.6 billion to Purchase Yahoo

[Evan Leibovitch]

CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
> Sympatico and Rogers are the two largest members of the oligopoly that
> provide Internet service to Canadians. Sympatico is already
> pro-Microsoft. Rogers will follow suit if this deal happens. This is
> bad news for Canadians.
Not necessarily. Rogers, by virtue of their work so far with Yahoo, has
been competing with MS. It is certainly possible that they will seek
another partner or partners. A combination of Google and CTV Globemedia
would be a viable alternative to what Rogers now offers; I highly doubt
that Rogers will want to offer its customers a mere clone of what its
competition offers.

There are certainly areas in the US where the same thing is happening;
the cable operator uses MSN and the main telco/DSL system uses Yahoo (or
vice versa). This means that the MS/Yahoo deal will have to get past US
anti-trust regulators, and with a Democratic Senate and lame duck US
president, MS will not get the free ride it has enjoyed in the US for
the last eight years.

Not to say it won't happen... but it certainly won't happen easily or
quickly.

In any case... Yahoo has been been in steady decline for a decade, MS is
offering far more than it's worth, and the payoff will likely be less
than it expects (MS Live's own search systems are already far superior
to Yahoo's).

- Evan

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists