With Microsoft’s announcement of a $44.6 billion offer to buy Yahoo at $31 per share in stock and cash, tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of people may be wondering what will happen if their web e-mail, on-line photos, portal home page and numerous other web sites and tools that the two companies offer.
Long Zheng has posted a table that summaries the huge overlap of competing Microsoft and Yahoo offering. Among the overlaps are:
Yahoo.com vs. Msn.com, Yahoo Mail vs. Live Hotmail, Yahoo Messenger vs. Live Messenger, Yahoo Search vs. Live Search, etc.
He notes:
Now imagine for each and every one of these you have to make a decision - to keep it as is, integrate Yahoo’s into Microsoft’s, integrate Microsoft’s into Yahoo’s or even come up with a new hybrid. Simple branding aside, I think the developers are going to have to work quite a few late nights to integrate what I believe are two monolithic systems together.
I agree with his final note: Whatever they do, they better not ruin Flickr.