MSN-Yahoo a Successful Combo or Another AOL-Netscape?

By laura on February 2nd, 2008

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When I wrote my post on this news yesterday, it was based on the assumption that Microsoft would take over Yahoo and keep it as it currently is, but make improvements with it. While this is an idealistic view, it’s probably not realistic. More likely, MSN would absorb Yahoo, giving many aspects of it the MSN brand when in reality, they should allow the Yahoo brand to absorb MSN. Or even worse, they might try to merge some common features and do away with others, causing mass confusion with it’s users. Yahoo has acquired some great websites such as MyBlogLog, Delicious, Flickr and most recently Zimbra and has updated it’s email, groups and MyYahoo features. MSN has also made updates to their news pages and email programs, adding the live.com to the email options. But I have to admit I’m not that familiar with MSN or the things they offer. I gave up on them a long time ago, even before the live features came to be. But the one thing I love about MSN is their homepage for news and their financial articles.

There once was talk about MSN buying AOL, but it didn’t happen. Instead, TimeWarner merged with AOL and in the process acquired Netscape, who was previously bought by AOL. The Netscape Navigator is now defunct and it’s no longer supported as of yesterday. And look at what a hot mess these mergers turned out to be. It seems to work out better when a large company takes over a smaller company, but maybe the merger of large companies causes an impact that is similar to an implosion.

So I update what I said in my post yesterday. Maybe an MSN/Yahoo merge is not such a good idea. Or maybe it is. If they do merge, it will be interesting to see if they pull it together and become the next Google, or if they implode themselves like AOL/Netscape/Time Warner. The worst case scenario would be if they merge and fail to compete with Google and then Google buys it and becomes the sole monopoly. That is almost too scary to think about.