Comments on: Yahoo-Microsoft deal less likely, analyst says

The likelihood of a search partnership has dropped in recent weeks and is now just 50-50, says Collins Stewart analyst in a research note.

[Random_Walk]

Aggarwal is right... but it's fairly obvious. Bing won't get Microsoft out of 3rd place, and Yahoo is recovering (albeit slowly) from the Yang era of last year.

The whole cloud computing thing is already Google's game to lose, given the moves it has made already; nobody wants to be locked-in to Microsoft any more than they absolutely have to these days.

As a side note, Yahoo is doing fairly well in the cloud space as well (evidence by example? See Comcast's use of Zimbra --and not, say, hosted OWA or similar-- for all of its webmail services).

[Super2online]

Gaining market share works at a snails pace. Even a great company can only expect to gain 1 or 2 percent a month or even every other month. Even with great publicity, marketing, and Bings excellent user interface and much more relavant results among other improvements and enhancements, it will take Microsoft at least the rest of the year to catch Yahoo.

Google is now analysing what Microsoft has done and will look to incorporate the best of what can be added without it appearing that they copied it. However, unless they buy the tech they need, it will take at least a year or two to deploy. Of course nobody thinks they have been resting on there laurals either. I'm sure they have been develping other features that can be implemented sooner to regain some of the mojo they may have lost with the Bing turn around for Live Search.

My guess is this is a huge wake up call for Google. They have been taking their lead for granted and assuming no one could catch them with the momentum they had. It just goes to show you that it's always better to lead than to follow. Microsoft is getting that now and beginning to travel down a path that innovates, instead of replicates.

[kojacked]

"nobody wants to be locked-in to Microsoft any more than they absolutely have to these days". That's your perception and not a reality. Microsoft has been more open than it has been ever with Ray at the helm. Despite what you might think Microsoft earns its customers by making products they want and not by tricking them. Based on your remark all vendors (Sun, Oracle, IBM, Apple, etc.) all promote vendor lock-in because they want to earn their customer's loyalty.

[Random_Walk]

Oh no, kojacked - that's cold reality. I've personally seen large corps go out of their way to avoid lock-in - and unless you've actually had to shake out old data and convert it to the new, or been forced to buy a new (and expensive) version of otherwise perfectly working software (because suddenly there's incompatibilities with a related bit of software), you'll never understand exactly why that is.

@Super2Online: Perhaps, but you have to remember - Yahoo is recovering, Google isn't sitting still, and there's still competition from folks lower on the food chain (e.g. Ask.com)

[mbenedict]

@Random_Walk:

So, Random_Walk, name ONE large corporation which has converted a core business application from a Microsoft solution and adopt a Google cloud offering instead.

I mean, since you've "personally seen" this happening, I mean.

[Random_Walk]

bzzzt! Logical Fallacy, called on mbenedict - False Dilemma - 15 yard penalty (I never mentioned Google as _the_ specific go-to solution, but that the move away from Microsoft lock-in in general has contributed to Google and other Microsoft competitors gaining advantage, especially on the web.).

Now, as for specific examples? I have seen departments at Intel (as personal example) move from Sharepoint to Wiki-based CMS solutions, from Windows to Linux as a development platform (esp. in the embedded space), and from Visual Studio to Eclipse.

Of course, we can also point to specific cloud-only examples at large: The focus of generic webmail has moved from Hotmail/Live to GMail (mostly because the Hotmail/Live webmail domain is a known spam-factory and gets blacklisted more often than not among SMTP servers, but I digress). YouTube stomped Soapbox (remember Soapbox?) flat. Last I checked, Microsoft has yet to make a dent in Google Docs' domain, in spite of Microsoft's best efforts (*cough*Public SharePoint-based efforts*cough*)

So - you were saying?

[kojacked]

"nobody wants to be locked-in to Microsoft"

becomes

"I've personally seen large corps go out of their way to avoid lock-in" - Yep that's right -- companies that practice vendor lock-in avoidance don't just avoid Microsoft. They avoid being tied to ANY one vendor. But you know that because you are so smart.

And an answer to "name ONE large corporation which has converted a core business application from a Microsoft solution and adopt a Google cloud offering instead."

is flatly answered with "The focus of generic webmail has moved from Hotmail/Live to GMail (mostly because the Hotmail/Live webmail domain is a known spam-factory and gets blacklisted more often than not among SMTP servers, but I digress). YouTube stomped Soapbox (remember Soapbox?) flat. Last I checked, Microsoft has yet to make a dent in Google Docs' domain, in spite of Microsoft's best efforts (*cough*Public SharePoint-based efforts*cough*)". Hmmmm... these all don't sound like core business apps moving to the cloud.

BTW, why Comcast for consumers uses Zimbra they host many Microsoft services on Comcast Business (Outlook, OWA, SharePoint, ActiveSync). Check it out here: https://businessclass.comcast.net

Please serve up some facts not your usual fiction next time.

[Uilleam]

Still not sure how these things are measured. Here on the 'ground' with Midwest end-users, I don't know anyone who uses Yahoo anything, let alone their search. It must be a coastal, or metropolitan thing that keeps it afloat.

Here in the heartland, from what I've seen and heard, Bing is a hit, and is already #2 to Google, albeit a really distant #2. The kids are "Binging" all over the place, or at least say they are.

I don't think Microsoft really needs a Yahoo deal as much as Yahoo does. I think Zimbra is their only really success in a decade, and that's not enough to sustain a company their size.

I don't think Microsoft will ever catch the monopolistic juggernaut known as Google, but I think they will fare well enough, especially with enterprise cloud applications, to remain a major player for a long time. I don't feel Google has yet to grasp enterprise needs, as a lot of their products seem to be geared towards technophiles and not the larger audience of end-users.

[mbenedict]

Yahoo Mail is used by like 200+ million people. Flickr (another Yahoo company) is also massively popular. Yahoo is the default portal for millions of cable & DSL users through agreements with their providers (which is where Zimbra comes in, for example). Not to mention Yahoo News is still the #1 news site on the web. All these services and more mean hundreds of millions of users have Yahoo IDs and likely to use Yahoo search.

[The_happy_switcher]

I bet that $31/share offer looks really good now. Oops.

[lonestarState]

Using both Yahoo and Bing for search I rarely need to search google for anything. Both search services are very similar. Look at the APIs of both any services and you will find many similarities. Taking in one step further, using the BuildaSearch service you can switch between Yahoo and Bing results instantaneously. Making a long story short, Yahoo, Bing and Google should continue independent from each other.

[Michael_Martinez]

The metrics used to rate Microsoft as the third-place search engine are flawed, being based on the obsolete principle of gauging success in terms of page views (number of queries performed).

Google serves a lot of its own content in response to queries now so Google's so-called "market share" is inflated because it essentially leeches traffic from the rest of the Web.

Microsoft search destinations have served around 100 million monthly visitors for a year or longer. By contrast Google has been unable to reach more than 140 million monthly visitors and Yahoo! has been stuck down around 60 million monthly searchers.

The real story here is that BING finally gives Microsoft an edge over Google in the area that matters most: relevance of search results. Google has increasingly sacrificed the relevance of its search results in its efforts to make its PageRank algorithm look like it can actually deliver good quality sites.

[JCPayne]

Another ICAHNN victory story. He should have purchased Circuit City too and merged it with Blockbuster. Then he'd have 3 strikes.