10.12.2005

Commentary

Keep ... your enemies closer

The art of the portal war has definitely created some rather eyebrow-raising alliances — surely as an attempt to keep Google in check. Yahoo! and MSN today announced that they will link their IM networks. Earlier, Microsoft reportedly approached AOL about potentially combining the two companies. While I see an advantage to having interoperability between two different IM protocols, I'm still not seeing any real advantages (from a business or user standpoint) to an MSN-AOL deal (other than possibly quieting down Icahn)? If you put together two oversized, bureaucratic companies that have been disappointingly uninnovative and slow to market, wouldn't you just get an even more unwieldy, more sluggish entity with a lot of redundancy and less focus? Guys, simplify, not super-size.

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