Portal, Schmortal
My friend Lenny just bought 100 shares of Yahoo. He figures it just may have another bounce left (no dead cat jokes, please). I say don't hold your breath waiting for that.
Lenny asked me to advise Microsoft to renew its offer to buy Yahoo in my blog. So here I am doing my buddy a favor. Sure, Steve Balmer monitors my blog for strategy advice, then jumps on my every suggestion. Ditto my breath-holding comment.
There is no doubt that the Yahoos were lost in an alternate reality when they turned down Microsoft's generous offer. Today, the market values the company at a sliver of what the Softies offered. Must have been fun watching those billions disappear. So, Steve, by all means make another bid. At a small premium over today's valuation. Do it for Lenny.
This reminds me of when AOL sold itself to Time Warner. My take on that at the time was that Case and company had turned play money into real money. We saw how that worked out for Time Warner. So, Steve, maybe you should just buy Lenny's Yahoo shares at a nice premium and I'll let you off the hook about buying the rest of the company.
The problem is that the day of the web portal has long since passed. It was a transitional concept that bridged the pre-web internet era and the web era. AOL was the poster child for that bridge. But the only real need for the bridge was for users who had relied on a portal to organize the pre-web online chaos. Once the web took hold, search became the only organizing tool most folks needed. Like in Google.
Yahoo, like AOL, is a portal dinosaur. It evolved later than AOL, but both are headed for extinction. That has been slowly happening for years now. Extinction of large beasts rarely occurs instantly.
You know all this, Steve. You have your own portal dinosaur, MSN. Mating two dinosaurs will not produce a new super-dino that can dominate the web landscape. You need a completely new organizing principle for your web properties. Portal isn't it.
Sorry, Lenny, but I just couldn't give Steve Balmer bad advice. Think what that would do to my reputation...
Lenny asked me to advise Microsoft to renew its offer to buy Yahoo in my blog. So here I am doing my buddy a favor. Sure, Steve Balmer monitors my blog for strategy advice, then jumps on my every suggestion. Ditto my breath-holding comment.
There is no doubt that the Yahoos were lost in an alternate reality when they turned down Microsoft's generous offer. Today, the market values the company at a sliver of what the Softies offered. Must have been fun watching those billions disappear. So, Steve, by all means make another bid. At a small premium over today's valuation. Do it for Lenny.
This reminds me of when AOL sold itself to Time Warner. My take on that at the time was that Case and company had turned play money into real money. We saw how that worked out for Time Warner. So, Steve, maybe you should just buy Lenny's Yahoo shares at a nice premium and I'll let you off the hook about buying the rest of the company.
The problem is that the day of the web portal has long since passed. It was a transitional concept that bridged the pre-web internet era and the web era. AOL was the poster child for that bridge. But the only real need for the bridge was for users who had relied on a portal to organize the pre-web online chaos. Once the web took hold, search became the only organizing tool most folks needed. Like in Google.
Yahoo, like AOL, is a portal dinosaur. It evolved later than AOL, but both are headed for extinction. That has been slowly happening for years now. Extinction of large beasts rarely occurs instantly.
You know all this, Steve. You have your own portal dinosaur, MSN. Mating two dinosaurs will not produce a new super-dino that can dominate the web landscape. You need a completely new organizing principle for your web properties. Portal isn't it.
Sorry, Lenny, but I just couldn't give Steve Balmer bad advice. Think what that would do to my reputation...
posted by Phil Bookman at 9:47 AM
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