Doesn't Add Up

John Dvorak isn’t often right. But mark his words if Microsoft gets a hold of Yahoo:

As Microsoft buys Yahoo!, it will announce a great future with no near-term changes. That will be a lie. Microsoft will immediately initiate an inventory of Yahoo! and will do a complete top-to-bottom salary survey and usefulness study of Yahoo! people. Within six months, Microsoft will announce a re-org of Yahoo! along Microsoft lines and fire half of the Yahoo! staff or offer them jobs in Redmond (or someplace else, like Podunk). Once the two companies have a similar structure, the Yahoo! departments will be absorbed into the Microsoft blob, with 90 percent of the Yahoo! people being subordinate to Microsoft overlords who will tell them what to do. Most will quit within a year or two.

Somehow Microsoft will manage to make 1 plus 1 equal 1.5, with the other 0.5 somehow gravitating to Google. The combined Microsoft-Yahoo! online numbers will be less than the total before the merger, but from Microsoft’s perspective its numbers will be up! And that is all that matters, right?

Right. Or as I put it a while back, somehow “two companies that have failed to compete with Google in the past, can succeed tomorrow by strapping themselves into the same lifeboat and bailing loads of cash out into the ocean.”