Like the kid in Can’t Buy Me Love, now that Microsoft has its eye on Yahoo!, everyone wants to get with the faltering ex-nerd. Good riddance, I say. Let News Corp. or Microsoft or a bunch of hedge fund guys pick up this dog at rock bottom prices and turn Yahoo into what Netscape eventually became — a pet project and then an also ran. This is a small world and mindshare, which fleeting, doesn’t often alight back on the popular sites of old. When, for example, is the last time you hit Buy.com on purpose? Didn’t think so. You’ll do a search and end up there “accidentally” but you don’t type in Buy.com to look for stuff if you don’t know where to look.
Good luck, Microsoft. That 16% Yahoo! search market share will definitely buoy MSN for a while, but not much else. Google might be a giant now, but she will fall to something else and so on and so on, ad infinitum. You can’t go home again.