What Microhoo means to you

The deal Microsoft and Yahoo made today to combine their ad and search efforts has its roots in the mid-1990s, near the dawn of the Web.

It was then Yahoo CEO Tim Koogle who made the decision that Yahoo would become a “portal,” a gateway to an internal Web world. All the smart guys in New York and in the mainstream media were urging this. Search, they said, was limited, it was techie, it was obscure. The real growth was in media.

Around the same time Microsoft decided it must “embrace and extend” its monopoly from Windows to Office to the Web, through Internet Explorer. Rather than selling what it made, it would bundle its monopoly products with its browser and dominate that way. This led to its antitrust case, and it has embraced, even extended itself into, the legal profession ever since.

So it was mistakes made long ago that created the new Microhoo. Yahoo will become the salesman and public face for Microsoft’s technology. The hope is this will slowly eliminate the technology, legal, and marketing mistakes both are known for, relying on the two firms’ complementary strengths.


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http://www.smartplanet.com/technology/blog/thinking-tech/what-microhoo-means-to-you/918/?tag=content;col1&gclid=CL73tZ6T0p0CFUtp4wodBnx8sQ