Yesterday I wrote about how we should do everything we can to save Yahoo! from certain death at the hands of Microsoft. That got me thinking over the course of my day about Who else should be looking at buying Yahoo! if they are on the block. So below is just few tech companies on my list and some of the reasons I came up with, but is not meant by any means to be conclusive, or have any possibility of ever happening.
-SAP – The 3rd largest software company in the world, but only a small percentage of the world would ever know it. SAP has been considered an acquisition target itself (it was even suggested that MS should buy SAP over Yahoo!), but by acquiring Yahoo! SAP gains access to some of the most innovative programmers in the Web 2.0 space, and they raise awareness of their corporate products that carry their name by associating their name with Yahoo!. If this were to happen they would almost certainly have to allow Yahoo! to remain nearly independent as their German corporate culture would most likely clash with Yahoo’s.
-IBM – If they ever wanted to get their name back in the general public/average consumer’s eye after their sale of their desktop and laptop business to Lenovo this would be the way. Again, they would have to let Yahoo! be an autonomous unit to avoid culture clashes.
-Adobe – Of all of the names being thrown around I think that this one has the most potential. With Adobe making a push at delivering some of it’s apps online and creating new apps that are solely online, such as their Buzzword online word processor, it’s existing efforts to monetize PDF’s with ads from Yahoo!, and similar cultures this could be a good marriage.
-Apple – Everyone knows that .Mac is in dire need of an update and new features, many of which Yahoo can provide, such as a better online photo sharing site, this can be found in Flickr. They could use the Yahoo Music and Video sites to drive traffic to iTunes. They could gain the groupware/email server package that they desparatly need to compete in the business market in Zimbra (which already runs natively on a Mac). This list could go on and on why this would be a great match, of all of the names on my list I think that it would be the best one. If this one were to happen, and I were Apple I would, day one, go to Google and strike a deal to let them run the Search Engine and Ad Serving business, and just focus on the Media and content portions of the company.
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