Nate Hallowell’s

What’s (already) in Microsoft’s Wallet? October 29, 2009

I apologize for the lack of posts over the last few weeks – I’ve been working on my Senior Thesis at Rochester Institute of Technology entitled: “The Sexual Scandal Genre of Political Apologia” (stay tuned…).

Anyway – as last Saturday passed (4/26) Yahoo officially denied Microsoft’s $44.6 bn bid for a takeover. Many sources are spectating Ballmer and the Microsoft crew to start throwing Micro-loyal voters on the Yahoo board in a proxy fight (some speculations include past Nextel and eHarmony CEO’s) but I wonder if Microsoft has really examined it’s own pocket for the resources it needs to compete with Google.

First, we just left the Google/DoubleClick takeover and it seems like the criticism on what was originally “objective” search has only begun. Won’t Microsoft get the same criticism if it owns Yahoo and MSN, selling search through both? Maybe everyone’s forgetting who’s got more power than Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo combined – the consumer.

I was reading Men’s Fitness Magazine the other day, and got to the bottom of a full page article only to find out that what I had been reading the entire time was an advertisement in disguise. I can honestly say that I won’t pick up that magazine ever again, even if I am in a physician’s waiting room for six days and it’s the ONLY thing to read! Brand loyalty goes a long way, but takes an even longer time to repair when it’s broken.

Along those same lines – what’s Microsoft proving to everyone if they “buy out” Yahoo? That with all of the resources, employees and connections they have they still aren’t creative enough to make their own search engine (MSN) competitive? Google requires its engineers to spend 15% of their time everyday just playing, with whatever they want to, just writing code and being creative. It is out of the box creativity cultivation that has surely been a large contributor to Google’s success – why can’t Microsoft do something new?