IndustryMSN and Yahoo Merged: How Would It All Mash Up?

MSN and Yahoo Merged: How Would It All Mash Up?

Hold on tight SEM artists. Search marketing is mainstream bacon & eggs in America this morning. Even the “tease” story on the Today show was Microsoft’s “huge takeover bid to purchase struggling” Yahoo!

Microsoft’s profits have been soaring due to increased demand for computer software. Yahoo is in the dumper, having just laid off 1,000 people. Is this acquisition finally real?

In 2006, the SearchEngineWatch blog was aBuzz with “Microsoft buying Yahoo” posts and hashing out possibilities in search marketing forum chit-chat threads. The Wall Street Journal prognosticated about the possibility of “a major departure for Microsoft.” They wrote, “Microsoft has considered the idea of acquiring a stake in Yahoo, and that the two companies have discussed possible options over the course of the past year.”

Some SEMs who love major search engine drama games saw this one coming down the pike years ago, and are still salivating. For others, the very idea would be hell. Personally it makes me just giddy.

The potential implications for both organic and paid search marketing could be del.ici.us for the Microsoft desktop. For PPC the much maligned Panama and AdCenter paid advertising platforms, along with all their graphically beautiful albeit dysfunctionalretarded inadequacies, could be fixed.

Think about the intriguing social media marketing adventures which would be possible. Maybe Yahoo Answers will integrate in Windows Mobile OS. Office 2009 might just include Word documents sporting a new “Insert/Flickr Image” function. How does this affect the market landscape for Google’s much heralded GPhone initiative. An aligned Yahoo/MS mobile platform-play would no doubt be a fascinating addendum to the Linux vs. Windows shoot out.

How will Yahoo email mashup with Outlook? What would pumping Yahoo Pipes into the MS machine mean to the feed aggregation paradigm? How would Microsoft create marketing mechanisms marketing to the decade old Yahoo Personals social graph?

The list goes on. MSN AdCenter was the first mainstream engine to dabble in demographic targeting, but the interface is weak. One would hope a combined Yahoo/MS team would know what to do with reams of data Yahoo has gathered about us all.

Aside from the potential effect on Yahoo/MS investors and the American economy (which will be reported on ad nauseum), the implications for the search marketing industry could be massive and exciting. Stay tuned. It might finally be true. Hold on tight search marketers and we’ll see how it all mashes up.

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