Recent Blog Posts
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The Times' Rorshach Geithner Story
Apr 27 20099:04am EDT -
Sinking Animal Spirits
Apr 27 20098:04am EDT -
Counter-cyclical Urban Policy
Apr 26 200910:04am EDT -
Be Your Own Counterfeiter
Apr 26 20099:04am EDT -
Being Tim Geithner
Apr 25 200912:04pm EDT -
Notes From a Press Conference Naif
Apr 25 20099:04am EDT -
What Good is the News?
Apr 25 20098:04am EDT -
Stressful Enough
Apr 24 20092:04pm EDT -
Not Regretting the Pound
Apr 24 20091:04pm EDT -
Introducing the New Ford Squeeze
Apr 24 20099:04am EDT -
Non-Economic Questions of the Day
Apr 24 20099:04am EDT -
The Stress Test Blind Alley
Apr 24 20098:04am EDT -
Happy Hour
Apr 23 20099:04pm EDT -
Recovery Without Rebalancing
Apr 23 20096:04pm EDT -
The Shape of Your Recession
Apr 23 20095:04pm EDT
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Yahoo and the Failed M&A Deals
Stephen Grocer has a great post about Yahoo's M&A track record: the companies it did buy and shouldn't have, as well as the companies it didn't buy and should have.
In the former camp: the $3 billion acquisition of GeoCities, the $4.3 billion acquisition of Broadcast.com. In the latter camp, Yahoo could have bought, but passed on, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and even, at one point, Google.
Of course, Yahoo being Yahoo, all of those companies, even Google, might have turned into GeoCities of their own had they been incorporated into the maw of the original Web Portal. Even Google's not all that great at acquisitions: look at how Dodgeball went nowhere after Google bought it.
In fact, with the possible exception of MySpace, it's hard to think of any big tech-space acquisition which looks like genius in hindsight. YouTube might do eventually, but the jury's still out on that one. If Microsoft does end up buying Yahoo, it's going to have to buck a pretty strong trend.
