Yousef Ourabi

In November as the reports of IAC splitting up were coming in, I asked the question Will Microsoft Buy Ask? — now that Microsoft has put in a generous offer of 44 billion at an estimated 63 percent premium of Yahoo’s current stock price I’m forced to re-evaluate that chain of thought, and admit that it is no longer likely. At the time I didn’t envision Yahoo having so much trouble with the basics, and thought it was a little more than Mr Ballmer was willing to drop — it is 40 billion after all. However; my logic was flawed. Why go after a distant number three (Ask.com) when you can go after a less distant number two (Yahoo).

Michael Arrington, of Techcrunch.com fame is now reporting that Murdoch’s News Corp is scrambling to enter a competing bid for Yahoo. Seems MS has stirred interest in the ailing Sunnyvale web destination, but what does this mean for Ask.com — too soon to tell. There is a definite trend of consolidation going on right now, and I am still expecting Ask.com to be sold to someone, News Corp is looking like the most likely buyer right now.

The other big concern is the culture class between MS and Y!, especially when it comes to open source involvement. This is largely a non-isseue — whatever Yahoo has contributed is already out there, you can’t un-open open source software. Yahoo has been most recently pouring resources into the Hadoop project, a distributed computing project. However, it has a lively and engaged community and would survive even if Yahoo dropped it like a hot potato.

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