We all learned earlier this week that we, Microsoft, walked away from the Yahoo deal. A little over a week ago, I got a kick out of a post at a financial blog (Minyanville) that proposed the following strategy:
“The Michael Corleone play for Ballmer is to offer Yahoo nothing, then treat them like that Nevada governor who wouldn’t sell the Corleones a gaming license. In two years MSFT will be able to throw an arm around a shivering Yahoo and say, “I know your stock is at $10. Out of respect I am giving you a $12 bid.”
Well, the real story is much bigger than buying Yahoo (in my opinion). I read a great opt-ed piece yesterday in the Wall Street Journal by Andy Kessler that really speaks to this big battle – The War for the Web.
It is really about the Cloud, Platform, the Edge, and Speed – and I think we are really positioned well with or without Yahoo.
Kessler points out:
“Programs run anywhere these days – on your desktop computer, on servers in data centers, on your iPod, cellphone, GPS, video game console, digital camera and on and on. It’s not just about beating Google at search, it’s about tying all these devices together in a new end-to-end computing framework.”
The proverbial cloud is all about ubiquity for the user’s computing experience. Its about seamless transition (think Live Mesh) regardless of platform, device or application.
Ray Ozzie’s Software + Services Strategy makes good reading at this point. You can find the PDF here! I will leave it at that.
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