10e20 Blog

Yesterday I spoke with Jeff Graham from USA Today and I am quoted in his story about the alleged Microsoft and Yahoo deal.

Could a potential Microsoft/Yahoo deal solve the freefall?

Short answer: no. Long answer: Internet analysts say it couldn’t hurt.

“Overnight, MSN and Yahoo’s market share doubles,” says Chris Winfield, president of 10e20, a New York firm that helps businesses set up search marketing campaigns. “They still aren’t as strong as Google, but they are healthier together than apart.”

My thoughts on this deal are simple. In a perfect world I feel that a Microsoft and Yahoo pairing would make a stronger company to compete against Google, with the key word being compete. Paired together their search market share would be at almost 39% - just 10% below Google’s 48%. But even in the perfect world scenario I don’t think they would be able to surpass Google in search anytime in the near future. With that being said, that’s the perfect world scenario, you are talking about two very ego driven companies that both just spent a great deal of time and money building search applications to compete with Google (Microsoft’s live.com and AdCenter; Yahoo’s Project Panama). They also used to work together (Microsoft used Yahoo’s ad platform) and that got scrapped. So….

But in the end, it doesn’t look like its going to matter anyway because according to recent reports talks have been called off for the time being. But they did say that they might still try to find a way of cooperating together in the future. Interesting times…