Easily the biggest tech story of the past two weeks has been Microsoft’s unsolicited $44 billion takeover bid for Yahoo! It’s not just the enormous amount of money that has brought it so much attention (though it would rank among the biggest tech mergers of all time), but also because of how drastically the combined company would alter the Internet landscape. If Microsoft succeeds in its proposed acquisition of Yahoo!, the combined entity would be by far the most trafficked on the web and control a third of US web searches.
Since Microsoft dropped its surprise announcement on the web on February 1st, a lot has been written about the deal, including by ReadWriteWeb. We wrote about how the merger would ultimately be a good thing for users. We wrote about the effect the acquisition might have on OpenID. We wondered if Google had made a misake to go hostile about the proposed merger. We suggested a plan B for Microsoft. We wrote about how publishers would fare under Microhoo. And when a rumor surfaced today that perhaps Microsoft was considering buying Facebook instead of Yahoo! we wrote about why we thought that was actually a good idea.
There have also been a good deal of alternatives proposed by bloggers, analysts, and pundits that would keep Yahoo! out of Microsoft’s hands. The most popular of which are probably the suggestion that Yahoo! outsource its search and text advertising business to Google, that News Corp. trade MySpace and other web 2.0 properties for equity in Yahoo!, or that Yahoo! merge with AOL (after AOL dumps its broadband business).
This is a topic that everyone has an opinion on. We’ve more than said our piece, as has the rest of the blogosphere. So inspired by today’s Mahalo Daily we’d like to turn the mic over to you. How would you fix Yahoo!? Would you take Microsoft’s offer? Hold out for more money? Or explore one of the other options? Or do you have a completely new idea that no one has talked about yet? Let us know in the comments below, and remember that the best daily comment on RWW (as chosen by our editors) wins a $30 Amazon gift card.
