Archive: February, 2008

Following Microsoft’s bid to take Yahoo, interest is circulating around another former Internet giant, AOL. According to Marketing Shift blogger John Gartner, Comcast is interested in grabbing AOL’s assets away from TimeWarner which conveniently wishes to shed them. Comcast’s interest is bound to pique Google’s, which already has a 5% interest in AOL.

Interestingly, Comcast and Google want AOL for completely different reasons. Comcast is one of the largest Telco ISPs in the United States. It wants to absorb AOL’s massive base of dial-up and high-speed subscribers. Google is the largest search engine on the ‘net. It wants to take advantage of AOL’s vast user-audience to expand its own advertising opportunities. Google already serves most ads shown at AOL but it doesn’t want to watch AOL’s market-share go to Comcast.

It is possible for TimeWarner to divide AOL into its two component pieces with ISP services going to Comcast and information services going to Google. Perhaps that would be the best move TW’s board could make. Though it makes sense for the worlds largest traditional publisher to have its own mega-network, TimeWarner has never been able to properly serve its info stream via AOL’s network.

Lost in the din of the commotion about Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo was the announcement on Tuesday that Yahoo would be cutting 1,000 jobs, approximately 14% of its headcount. The announcement was made at the tail end of last Tuesday’s Q4-2007 report which showed a 23% decline in quarterly revenues from the same period in 2006.

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang admitted the company is vastly overextended saying its focus in 2008 would be on, “… becoming a starting point for the most consumers on the Web; making the company a top choice for marketers seeking to place ads not only on Yahoo’s properties but also on sites across the Web; and opening up Yahoo’s technology infrastructure to third-party programmers and publishers.”

The job cuts are expected to hit in mid-February and were anticipated by industry observers as a signal showing where Yang really expects to take the company. All assumptions have been put aside in light of Microsoft’s $44.3 billion bid which was made public last Friday. Industry watchers are now hoping the layoffs give us a clue as to how the Yahoo Board of Directors intends to respond now that ownership of the company is in question.