Nerve Endings Firing Away

In an unsurprising move, Microsoft made a bid to buy Yahoo in order to increase its role in the World Wide Web with an astronomical offer of $44.6 billion. Traditionally, Microsoft has been relied on desktop software like its hallmark product, Windows and other ancillary softwares like Office, etc. It hasn’t made a serious dent in the Internet business world after acquiring Hotmail and half-baked services like Live Search. Even ContentAds did not deliver much in terms of taking on Google Adsense. Google’s forays into office suites and rise of open source products has seriously jeopardized Microsoft’s grasp on the software market. Perhaps the age of desktop computing for regular tasks is fading and much of it is moving to the Web. Of course, you would still have applications that will run only on the desktop like design software but that was never Microsoft’s forte.

With Google marching on and Yahoo unable to match it, this Microsoft-Yahoo partnership may in fact do something. Yahoo, in spite of its lackadaisical movements on the Web still has one of the dominant portals and its Mail and Answers services are one of the best on the Web. This partnership will let the two dawdling companies take on Google and perhaps give it a serious run for its money.

On a side note, I was surprised to see a significant typo in the news article that I found on Yahoo:

Microsoft executives did not indicate Friday exactly what they would do with Yahoo’s brand if their $45 million bid is accepted [source].

One character makes all the difference, folks. We aren’t talking about Bill Gates pocket change.