February 14, 2008
The Merger of Microsoft and Yahoo is like the Merger of Sears and Kmart
Both mergers are in reaction to getting beat in the marketplace by a rival with better infrastructure and a better business model.
As a person that uses all three adverting tools, Google AdWords, Microsoft AdCenter and Yahoo Search Marketing, I can say that Google AdWords is the easiest to use. Yahoo Search Marketing Tool won’t even let me turn a campaign on or off automatically and for international adverting I need to create a separate account for each country…that’s too time consuming.
Microsoft AdCenter does have some cool features for geo and demographic targeting but AdCenter has been slow (As in “we are adding more capacity to our servers to correct the problem”) and the interface is not very intuitive.
So if Search Adverting Revenue is the barometer for the success of a Microsoft Yahoo takeover, then Google may be the winner.
Microsoft would be better off offering free contextual ads for a couple of years to get market share and save about 40 billion dollars. In addition the culture of Yahoo and Microsoft will not merge well. Yahoo is a Valley company. Most Valley companies do not like Microsoft. If a Yahoo customer really wanted Hotmail, then they would have switched a long time ago. Microsoft may force Yahoo mail and IM clients to Google. Just our thoughts from the field…stay tuned; I hear that News Corp may get into this.
more at: Cleveland Internet Marketing
