Microsoft Watch: Look for a Yahoo Deal on the Horizon

Well, things are starting to come together here in the past couple of weeks to see where things are heading in terms of Micorsoft’s search arena. We have the impending lauch of Kumo…which may be named Bing.. but personally I like Kumo better. Then there is the cash raise. Then Microsoft semi-quietly opened an LLC venture in Delaware. Normally, this signals a partnership or a buy somewhere in the market.

It has been speculated that Microsoft was looking to acquire Citrix but I have yet to see nay other evidence that they are dancing together as of yet. It makes much more sense with the breakdown of talks earlier with Yahoo that they would go for another try…Personnally, I would go to them and say ‘Hey, we don’t really need search to survive but Google is eating up more and more share of the market. We could work together and turn this thing around in both our favors.’.

Yahoo has to look at this strategically from the fact that they could leverage Microsoft as well. Yahoo has a good deal of Karma with the community out there. So while Microsoft would have to work at buying into that Karma with any new tech that came out of the deal….Yahoo would not and therefore could conceivably capitalize on the outcome much faster than Microsoft could. Karma should not be discounted. Microsoft’s cloud computing thing has one big obstacle to overcome and that is when a competitor…and there are competitors out there…simply looks the customer in the eye and says..’Do you really trust you sensitive data with Microsoft..I mean given their past and all…’. Yep, that Karma can be leveraged to be a powerful selling point , indeed. It’s not that Microsoft has necessarily done anything wrong but the perception that something is not quite right in the land of the big M that could conceivably turn consumers away.

Well, in any instance it will be interesting to see what comes up in the next couple of weeks.

Cheers,
AJ