How will the Microsoft + Yahoo merger affect the directory sector?

Your unwillingness to read makes baby jesus cry. Try reading the post *right above yours*
here is a quick reference link for you:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=6413941&postcount=38

I highly doubt that gaygle is loving the fact that their stock is loses over this.

 

How will the Microsoft + Yahoo merger affect the directory sector?
It wont! the "directory sector" does not really exist, and if it does for some people, it has a looooong way to go to be affected at all.

 

To a point your right but just like flies there are tens of thousands of directories, each one of them taking at least some of the cake, even if its crumbs. Knowing larger corperations are as greedy as pigs they may just use the proverbial fly spray to wipe everyone out so that we don't even get the crumbs.

 

The problems with AOL and TW stem from the fact that the two companies continued to compete with each other... The overlap in services and competition for the same services, ie., TW cable (Road Runner Service) and AOL Time Warner (cable service) is partly to blame for the disastrous down turn.

Couple this with the fact that the company attempting to acquire the other was worth less in reality than the one it "acquired".

The merger made sense from the perspective of taking a communications giant and merging it with an information / media giant. It should have been win/win. The trouble is, each explored their original business model, and as I said before, each continued to compete with one another.

In the case of a SUN acquisition of Cobalt, we saw SUN acquire a competitor to kill a competitor. This was also disastrous IMO. Sun killed a market they could have made a killing in, because it was killing their overpriced status quo niche market.

For MS, if they intend to kill Yahoo, I think it will like be disastrous for them.

If they try to compete with them, it will be equally disastrous.

What MS needs is to leave Yahoo as is and allow both to compete autonomously but as one company with one direction.

How they do that? Who the hell knows..

 

Mia makes a good point. If MS is foolish enough to disband Yahoo!, MSN is done. It would be foolhardy to believe that all of Yahoo!'s users would jump to MSN and not Google.

With MS's thoughts on using their free email customers information as a commodity (something Yahoo never did), I worry that my accounts there will now become fodder for the machine. If they do like they did with Hotmail there will no doubt be a mass exodus of Yahoo mail users which would be more likely to switch to G than they would to Hotmail.

 

Most people would use other search engines if you could pay for a top position. The thing is that often you do not want to come to a commercial site. Say, for instance, that you would like to know something about "London Underground", you would not want the first 2 pages in google to point to commercial sites selling you "The London Underground Guide"....I would use another search engine if that happens....

/petpap