Have you ever had a threesome before? The saying goes that you should never have a threesome with someone that you wish to keep. If you think Microsoft Corp would leave Yahoo Inc. alone and let Google Inc. continues to dominate the lucrative online advertising, think again. It appears Microsoft might launch a threesome act – buy Yahoo’s search business before buy Facebook and enjoy the excitement of threesome.
Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT, stock) has proposed to buy Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO, stock) search business and take a minority stake in the company, stopping short of a full-blown merger at this moment. In this deal, Yahoo would sell its Asian assets namely Yahoo Japan and China’s Alibaba Group. Financier Carl Icahn has launched a proxy fight last week to force Yahoo to reopen talks with Microsoft. It’s not sure if Yahoo would prefer to sleep with Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG, stock) or Microsoft.
Facebook on the other hand is said to be the next internet giant, the equivalent if not bigger than Google. There’re people who believe that the actual fight is between Google and Facebook. However if Microsoft indeed is planning to buy Yahoo search business and Facebook, then the battle would takes a new twist with Microsoft vs Google after all. It makes sense for Microsoft to acquire a “third company” because even with Yahoo under its belt, the company is still a distance from the giant Google.
There’s another reason why Facebook was targeted. In spite of the not-so-distance fact that Google will owns almost everything from your soul to your DNA, well literally, the search engine’s spiders somehow “can not penetrate” Facebook simply because Facebook is not open to public. Nevertheless there’s an alternative for Google and its called FriendFeed. Compared to Facebook, FriendFeed is open to public (hence Google’s spiders) and the good news to Google is – it has almost all of Facebook’s killer features.
So, the battle continues between the “close-society” (Microsoft) and the “open-society” (Google) and the winner will definitely be their partners – Yahoo, Facebook and FriendFeed. Facebook Mark Zuckerberg meanwhile is punching his calculator and might only consider selling his company for nothing less than $20 billion.
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May 20th, 2008 by financetwitter
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Comments
thanx for your comment itgeek …
i understood facebook and google are two different animals but when you’re talking about two future “internet giants”, the talks were that facebook could rivals google …
just googled “facebook vs google” and you can get the results …
google might be the big gun in the search industry but so do facebook in people networking …
but then that was me …
cheers …
OK, this is where your better stock market awareness takes a backseat to my tech geek awareness:
While Facebook can be an important asset in terms of user-generated content and number of eyeballs, it can in no way be characterized as the “equal” sparring partner of Google. They do completely differnt things. Facebook has no internet content search. The eyeballs for Google is still very much larger than that of Facebook. I would like to see you cite sources for the “people” who think it will be a “Google vs. Facebook” fight in the future and that Facebook will be bigger than Google, unless Facebook goes into search as well.