AOL + Yahoo! = WTF?
If you take two turds and mash them together, how likely is it that the result won’t end up resembling something turd-like? Not very it seems, but that’s exactly what Yahoo! and Time Warner are discussing in heated, desperate meetings right this hour.
If news reports are to be believed, the search engine and web portal is holding discussions with the world’s #1 media conglomerate to hash out a merger between AOL and Yahoo! The deal reportedly would also involve some cash infusion by Time Warner that would give it 20% of the combined business. Which begs the question: How much is 20% of failure worth these days?
Seriously, these people have all totally lost their minds. Yahoo! has like three things going for it right now: A popular news aggregation site, an adequate sports section, and Flickr. The rest of it seriously could disappear from the Interwebs and no one would notice. And as for AOL, the only things working well are AOL Fanhouse (sports blog) and Weblogs, Inc. (Engadget, Joystiq). So maybe you could put those things together — news, sports, blogs, Flickr — and make something work, but is it any better than what it was before? Is it better for shareholders? I’m just amazed we’re having this discussion.
Of course we wouldn’t be having this discussion if it wasn’t for The Borg and their $44 billion offer to buy Yahoo! two months ago. This is how badly Yahoo! doesn’t want to be assimilated, that they are talking to AOL about a merger. But even Micro$oft’s deal makes little to no sense — MSN plus Yahoo! is still a case of two wrongs don’t make it right.
About the only one using his head right now — crazy as it sounds — is Rupert Murdoch. Rupe has been trying to get rid of MySpace for a year now and maybe he’s found the opportunity by offering help Steve Ballmer fund his takeover. Oh and while you’re handing out big bags of cash, maybe you’d like to buy my slowly sinking social networking site.
Just like any other business that has run it’s course, it’s time for the “Web portals” to face facts and admit it’s over. That 1990s notion of the sticky all-in-one website that has everything for everyone is no longer viable nor useful. The Internet and Internet users have moved on. What we crave are sites and services that feed our passion in a single niche: Last.fm (music), Twitter (communication), YouTube (video). They do one thing, they do it well, and they can turn on a dime and do it differently if users tell them to.
Watching this Yahoo! saga play out is like witnessing the final days of old stars finally burning the last of their fuel in a spectacular supernova. Any matter left over will surely collapse into a black hole from which investors money will never escape.
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