Microsoft has long been kicked round the block inside the Internet company for heading on 15 a long time. Now it's potentially payback time.
While every person else hunkers down and fights to survive, Microsoft will get to sit again and make a decision who to acquire. When it decides, it could dig into a $20 billion dollars pile that can almost replenish by itself this yr with $15 billion of no cost cash flow. Nobody else, including Google, will obtain this a lot of a relative gain in the global economic collapse.
(Google, in addition, is now hamstrung by alert regulators--thanks,
Office 2007 Standard, in part,
Windows 7 Product Key, to Microsoft's lobbying--and is concentrated on cutting expenses and narrowing its ambitions. These need to maintain it distracted for your next few years.)
Who could Microsoft purchase? Some obvious names, and many smaller not-so-obvious ones.
But the first thing Microsoft needs to do if it truly is to succeed long-term inside the World wide web company is build a central consumer brand that it may hang everything else off of. (Alternatively, it could focus on the back end, via search and other technologies, but this likely won't be as profitable. The vast majority of Google's immense profit comes from searches on its own site, not third-party sites, and the same will hold true for Microsoft).
The big consumer Web brands other than Google include:
Yahoo AOL Facebook MSN, et al (Microsoft needs to consolidate ALL its Internet brands into a single. This one's probably the most prominent).
Microsoft could probably purchase Yahoo,
Office 2007 Standard Key, AOL,
Office 2010 Activation Key, and Facebook today for $20 billion of cash. It could then consolidate them under a single brand and build a strong alternative for advertisers vis a vis Google. (Vastly easier said than done, but possible.)
If Microsoft isn't willing to put all its weight behind a single brand,
Office 2010 Code, it will probably fail regardless of what it buys. This has become Microsoft's Achilles heel for that past 15 years--an unwillingness to commit to one particular World wide web brand and strategy--and we're not optimistic that it will be able to get out of its own way this time either.
We still think the smart play here would be for Microsoft to spin its World wide web operations OUT of Microsoft and INTO Yahoo and then build everything about that brand as a separate public company. We think Steve Ballmer is congenitally predisposed against this approach, however, even though it would likely be a great move for Microsoft shareholders (who would own most of the new Yahoo AND the original Microsoft).
But, in any event, as the Valley goes into the fetal position, Microsoft's relative position is growing stronger. And we imagine this is not lost on the folks in Redmond.