The story of Microsoft's unsuccessful bid for Yahoo
Here's a series of four cartoons gathered from different sources showing the whole story of the Microsoft bid for Yahoo.
1) Market shares of the three companies. Story of the big fish eat small fish and small fish eat plankton.
2)Basically, the loser Microsoft hopes to get the help of the small Yahoo to fight with Google in the search engine and advertising industry.
3)However, Yahoo has been rejecting the bids, saying it will need to consider. The final fallout happens when Microsoft increase its bid to US$33 per share, but its Chariman and Co-founder Jerry Yang wanted US$37 per share.
4) The final outcome is Microsoft abandons its bid for Yahoo and try to seek for some forms of co-operation with rival firm Google. And Yahoo's shares plummented down all the way.
Sources:
- http://www.wittysparks.com/2008/04/25/microsoft-pursues-yahoo/
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/brucesterling/2239796574/
- http://caglepost.com/cartoon/
The story is rather simple and while Microsoft has always been looking for ways to get monopoly power in every single markets that it enters. Unfortunately, Google has a amazingly high market share in search engine as well as the online advertising industry (which generates a lot of revenue at a very low cost). Currently, it is still unclear what form of collusions might happen as Yahoo is looking for ways to work with Microsoft or Google and Microsft is looking for Yahoo or Google. Of course, these three companies have always been trying to differentiate their product by constantly introducing new stuff which shows that in a highly competitive oligopoly market structure, consumer welfare seems to improved.
By the way, after writing this article, i think i might be doing my ilp on the online search engine and advertising industry.
