MicroHoo Not To Be

So Microsoft has “walked away” from the Yahoo deal. Assuming this is not just a very aggressive maneuver to force Yahoo stock down precipitously, this is a good thing.

A Yahoo acquisition by Microsoft would surely result in another “Acquire, Merge, Destroy” episode with the devastation of Yahoo. As one of Ballmer’s lieutenants reportedly observed, if Microsoft went ahead with a hostile takeover, the Yahoo employees “would burn the furniture.” For all the complaints about Google being the “next Microsoft,” Microsoft still has a profit margin of 80% or so on Windows, so it hardly needs to increase market share.

Speaking of which, one wonders what, if any, Thompson’s recent acquisition of Reuters (the company now to be known as Thompson Reuters) will have on Thompson West and its legal products such as Westlaw, Elite and Prolaw.

In firms with such radically different cultures, takeovers are iffy in the best of times and generally result in the destruction of the culture of the company taken over – look at Lexis Nexis which is in the process of utterly destroying the culture of both Time Matters and PCLaw” and subsuming them under the “traveling book salesmen” concept that seems to dominate LexisNexis..