These kinds of articles from the New York Times and Wired about the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo acquisition really get to me. Why? They’re premise is all wrong. When it comes to whether Microsoft will acquire Yahoo, it’s not about winning and losing the deal. No matter what happens, the next day will come, and the next, and the next. And it’s what Microsoft does with these days that’s really at issue–whether with Yahoo or not.
The trouble signal is not whether Microsoft tries and fails, but whether they are hungry enough to do anything at all. Lack of hunger is the killer of most every tech enterprise I’ve been around. The engineers have to be hungry. The sales staff has to be hungry. The executives have to be hungry. You have to have the drive to try. You have to have the capacity to keep going despite all odds. Tomorrow’s success will quiet the fiercest fortunetelling naysayer.
What I see that’s so promising about all of this is that Yahoo is expressing their hunger right now as it tries to position itself better and Microsoft is expressing their hunger as they try to find the sweet spot on the web. I see losers in neither of them.