GracefulFlavor

Fake Steve Jobs pens one of his better analyses, this time around discussing the inviability of the Microsoft/Yahoo merger proposition:

Back when Microsoft was riding high I was talking to Ballmer at some conference — I have no idea where or when, but I’m sure he remembers exactly which conference this was and what day of the week it was and the number of the hotel room he stayed in — and on that day somebody had just announced some huge anti-Borg merger, and all the idiots in the press were saying this was going to kill Microsoft, and Ballmer was just laughing. Laughing. Laughing his ass off.

Ballmer said he loved when his rivals merged, because whenever the also-rans in any market start teaming up they might as well be waving a white flag. Because it’s over. You’ve beaten them. You’ve driven them to despair. They haven’t been able to beat you on their own; there’s no way they’ll do it together. Then he told me that line about the hundred-yard dash.

I’ll never forget it. But I guess he has.

My first thought when I read the news about the merger offer via Steve Rubel on Twitter was, holy shit, what a tacit admission by Microsoft that their entire internet strategy has failed. All the gyration and buzzwording and blogging and marketing about their entire Live web service/product offerings have bore no fruit. Now it’s oh-shit time and Microsoft needs to go to plan B, which is to try and buy innovation and market share. The Google juggernaut isn’t bleeding. Time to try to kludge together some bigger weapons.

It’s not going to work, as the sheer heft of this deal is way too unmanageable. The cultures are too different, the technology infrastructures aren’t congruent, the management isn’t there. If I were a Microsoftie, I’d be terrified, because 44.6B has a strange way of turning everything you’re doing upside down in the name of almighty ROI. If this deal passes, everything will change for both companies, and anything employees used to think about their career paths can more or less be junked immediately. Such are the spoils of desperation.

FSJ says it a bit more colorfully:

Imagine a circus act in which two enormous, clumsy, awkward elephants that don’t really like each other are supposed to mate while riding on skateboards. Now imagine that it is your job, you lucky bastard, to be one of the little circus clowns standing alongside trying to make this extremely unnatural and unholy act take place. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people will have their lives completely ruined and flipped upside down for the next two years because of this deal. They’ll see even less of their kids. And those ski weekends? Forget about it. Ain’t gonna happen. Meanwhile Google will keep pulling away.

I wish Microsoft and Yahoo all the luck in the world, because they’ll need it in order to successfully pull off one of the largest and most complex mergers in the history of technology. In the end, though, I don’t see it working at all, and I see Google sitting pretty through all of this and dominating even more, because the amount of confusion and tripping-about on the Microsoft/Yahoo side will be epic.

I guess that’s why I don’t see this deal actually getting done. Someone somewhere will step in, illustrate this reality, and decide that you can’t cure a known problem by spending $44.6B and slamming another culture into the mix. Forced interventions of that magnitude just don’t gum up the works — they stop it entirely.