Microsoft + Yahoo = Sears + Kmart

Holy cow!  Microsoft has offered to buy Yahoo! for over 44 Billion.  What a load of crap.

I want to be one of the guys at Microsoft who comes up with these hair brained schemes.  I mean seriously, if I had 44 billion dollars to blow I'm sure I would be able to shop better than the guys who are filling up the shopping cart now.

This merger, or whatever it is supposed to be reminds me a lot of the Sears + Kmart deal.  You take two mid to poor performing companies and slap them together.  In the Sears/Kmart deal they thought at least Kmart had some interesting real estate.  Which makes me wonder if Yahoo has some nice network operations sites somewhere because Microsoft outsources most of their operations.

Neither Microsoft nor Yahoo have a decent search engine so combining two lousy search engines does not make a good search engine.

The other thing is this: what about spending some of that extra 44 billion that's burning a hole in your pocket and make a decent operating system?  If Microsoft wants to get out of the operating system business, how about open sourcing Windows Vista and let some talented people have a go at it?  That might make a Ubuntu killer.

I don't get why anybody would buy Yahoo even if it was only a few million bucks.  Somebody on Digg said Flickr was an nice asset, but come on, it's a bloody picture sharing application.  Microsoft already has the makings of that on their MSN spaces.  Do you want to tell me they don't have people smart enough at Microsoft to make a freaking Flickr application?  That can't be right.

So I keep coming back to the real estate question.  There is just nothing at Yahoo worth one billion much less 44 billion dollars.

BTW, I have a bridge I am selling you spendy Microsofties.