Click here to subscribeMicrosoft and Yahoo!s post-acquisition cultures
And so it happens - Microsoft bid to buy Yahoo for 44.6 billion dollars this morning at $31 dollars a share (considerably above yesterday’s closing price for Y! stock). But this is not a post about economics but innovation, company mindset and culture. Microsoft and Yahoo are two very different companies - and having visited both their headquarters in the past in Redmond and California, it is hard for me to imagine how things will evolve if the deal goes through.
Microsoft is a huge company, with a culture that’s very different from Y!s. It offers products that fit into a very traditional mindset, whereas Yahoo was trying to change from that into a culture based on innovation, more in touch with its hacker roots. The Yahoo Brickhouse effort (which I’m a huge fan of) in particular, was a great example of that shift.
How companies react to mergers, acquisitions and new additions to teams has been one of my interests for a while. In theory, diversity fuels innovation because each company will have it’s own set of practices and answers to problems. This fuels discussion and hopefully the emmergence of a new set of signature practices on the new - and definitely more purple - Microsoft. This is quite likely a good thing for them.
What I wonder about though, is how some of the people now at Yahoo - who don’t particularly enjoy the Microsoft mindset - will react to this piece of news. Or how the stockholders will react. I guess we’ll see, but it’ll be an interesting next few days.
If you want to read up on the news of the acquisition bid, check the press release, the coverage at Techcrunch, or Techmeme, that will likely be on fire today.
Fred,
it’s just as you write, I honestly think that it’s going to be extremely difficult to say no to such [brutal] proposition of value.
Personally I think that we can only benefit from diversity in cultures from both companies and all the other out there, what makes them unique also guarantees a decent flow of innovation and values. The way I see it the side effects of having a mono-culture can only help limiting our options, kill innovation or somehow dramatically under mine it.
It’s going to be interesting as you mention to witness how two very different cultures may merge together, looking at a positive side of this and if it indeed goes thru, the result is unpredictable, of course, but an injection of the counter culture in yahoo and it’s openness in Microsoft can only do wonders, no?
Strange Friday I would say…
Comment by Pedro Custódio — February 1, 2008 @ 3:58 pm