After buying Skype and investment in Facebook, Microsoft will be bidding (in a team with other investors) to buy Yahoo this time. There are two reasons why Microsoft would rather be happy this time. First, Microsoft’s last attempt to buy Yahoo in 2008 was at much higher price than what they would be offering this time. It is cheaper now by more than half the price they offered in 2008. Second, fortunately enough, their attempt in 2008 was successfully prevented by the Yahoo management. In a way, unwillingly though, Yahoo management prevented Microsoft from spending more money in this investment! Granted that Microsoft will be able to buy Yahoo in near future, what would this hold for us who are surfing the web?
From users’ benefit point of view, probably not-so-significant changes would be visible. Those who would be using yahoo mail and yahoo search, would be using Bingo and hotmail the way we used to get things out of it. The primary concern, as usual, would be the privacy issue, again. Yahoo shoppers’ data, chat clients’ records, yahoo profile data could easily be cross checked with that of hotmail and facebook profiles. Your visibility would be much obvious to Microsoft trackers than it was ever before. Reduction in competition is a good thing for corporations, but not always so for customers/users. It seems like the waning competition in Silicon Valley’s soft-tech industry poses more privacy risks than it existed ever before. The only strong competition left out that can stand the storm in this emerging industry scenario is Google. It would be interesting to see how this emerging competition between these two giants works out in future.
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