Douchebags Are For Yahoo! Takeover; Cool Kids Oppose It

Friday, May 16 at 5:29 p.m.

Sick Of It All

I guess I'm the only guy who's following this whole Microsoft/Yahoo! arranged marriage debacle who doesn't have money on the table. I'm reading CNET. I'm looking at the forum posts from bloodsucking scum-bag day-traders who think they know how a tech company works because they watched "Pirates of Silicon Valley". All they care about is running up the stock price, then selling out once the sale goes through. After all, that MS stock won't be worth shit in three years, whether or not they've dragged Yahoo! down with them.

A Yahoo! takeover doesn't make sense for Yahoo!, and it doesn't make sense for Microsoft. Both companies have wildly different cultures, both companies have wildly different development styles, and both companies have a lot more to lose through a merger than they have to gain.

Microsoft is Fucked

Microsoft is a company who has lost it's way. Their intellectual assets have already jumped ship for Google. Why? Because they hated working for Microsoft. They hated the culture. They hated the fact that they were hated by the community. Microsoft is a company that can't make software anymore. They've gotten so bogged down in the 'process' of development that any creative spark has been snuffed out a long time ago. They have idiot execs who are talking about software as a service as software you can buy on a CD. They're watching Google, Yahoo and Amazon duke it out to become THE company will provide the infrastructure upon which all business is done, and they're scratching their heads trying to figure out how to sell more seats of Office.

The guys at Microsoft do not get it. So they need to be something else. Microsoft needs to be Yahoo! They're looking south, and saying "gosh, if we were in the position that they're in, we could really do something!" The trouble is that Microsoft isn't in the position that Yahoo is in because Microsoft is not Yahoo.

Day Traders to Mortgage Brokers back to Day Traders

I am sick to death of reading posts by out of work mortgage brokers who have gotten into day-trading saying:

"jerry yang is a kid who's gonna have to give up his company to the grown-ups now lol i bought yahoo and oil futures this morning yo its dope im rich bitch"

Day traders should get a job and try out working for a living.

Anyways, Yahoo's been a grown-up company for about 13 years. Just because it hasn't been failing in a slow, painful and very public manner doesn't mean it's not a Real American Company. Yahoo! has been doing to the real-company thing since the 90s, as a matter of fact, Jerry Yang has been CEO of Yahoo! for less than one year! He was a founder, and at one time, probably in the distant past, he may have been CEO, but it's only been a year!

Yahoo is a real grown-up company -- and they'll blow Microsoft out of the water. Unless they merge.

Yang gave up the CEO position to Tim Koogle in 1995! 1995, motherfuckers! That's right - Jerry did the grown up thing way back then. Koogle thought ads were over after the dot-com-bust, and pushed yahoo into the realm of for-pay web based software. Remember when you had to pay $5 a month for a 100 Meg Yahoo mail account? That was Tim Koogle. That was back before internet douche-bags had started using the word "monetize" instead of "make money". After Koogle was Terry Semel. But the fact is that this company is not a dot-com toy, it's a serious contender for providing infrastructure to anyone who wants to do business in America.

Microsoft needs to become Yahoo! but they haven't got the internal momentum or "lets-go-do-it-now!" culture to do it. It seems like they've become a lot like Netscape circa "The Late 90's", where all new features are "way-more-complicated-then-we-thought". That's when your engineers start telling your product managers that a new feature is "impossible", even though yer PM sees it in a competing product.

The fact of the matter is this: no one wants to buy software and install it on their Windows Vista 2010 Desktop Server Ultimate Margarita Edition Fliptop Computer XP. No one wants that.

So anyways, a Yahoo! acquisition might be the only thing that can save Microsoft, but it sure as hell isn't good for Yahoo. For that matter, it causes Microsoft to lose focus too. How are they going to reconcile Yahoo's Zimbra offerings with their own Exchange offering? Are they going to run two competing business units?

Fact is that Yahoo has an awesome and ever-improving product catalogue that competes directly with Microsoft. They're increasing their market by migrating enterprises away from Microsoft products. They most definitely do not need the Microsoft legacy holding them back.

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This deal will go through though. It's not good for Microsoft, it's not good for Yahoo!, it's not good for anyone who should have a say in their own future. It is however, very good (in the short term) for investment banks and various billionaires who are looking to lock in what they are afraid is an inflated stock price. That's right - they're scared they paid too much. So instead of letting the management team at Yahoo continue to do a great job; they're trying to subvert the fundamentals; make a giant, useless and chimeric company; and cash out before the end of Q3.

And even if all the sheep who get their tech news from CNBC see through it, they won't call anyone on this shit because they have a few hundred dollars worth of Yahoo! on the table too.

Assholes.