Microsoft-Yahoo From a Zillow POV

I was talking with Rich Barton, CEO of real estate site Zillow, about the ongoing Microsoft-Yahoo drama, and he brought up a couple interesting points. One is that Zillow started getting more Yahoo resumes after Microsoft pulled out of the deal. Employees thought they were going to get a payday for their Yahoo shares and a nice severance from a package the Yahoo board put in place after Microsoft's offer. When Microsoft called it off, some of those folks, driven by financial concerns, apparently decided to move on. The renewed talks may have pushed pause on those departures, Barton says, but perhaps not for long.

Barton started Expedia inside Microsoft in the 1990s, then spun it out of the company because -- as he says -- he wanted to build a big consumer brand, and Microsoft had little interest in doing that. "I find it telling that the latest proposal seems to highlight the search and tech stuff and not the consumer/media/brands business," Barton wrote in an email. "Microsoft just doesn't have an appreciation of consumer businesses and brands in its bones."

As a lot of people are saying today, the restarted talks seem to be showing Microsoft's true colors: It wants the search and traffic from Yahoo and could care less about the content side of Yahoo.