Yahoo! Does What it Must, Microsoft Doesn't
The investor relations people at Yahoo! must have been taking some pretty strong cola drinks these past few days: on top of last week's earnings flap, Yahoo! announced the acquisition of Overture yesterday and a key marketing alliance with Oracle to target enterprise portals today. Phew, what's next? Most of the analysis of the Overture acquisition in the press is pretty obvious: basically, this was a "must do" move for Yahoo! if they were to position themselves with any amount of authority against Google's paid search ad placement capabilities. Microsoft, which had been romancing Overture for quite some time, was left at the altar, according to the Washington Post, unable to pick Overture's brains clean before they complete the development of a home-grown ad placement capability for MSN. As content and technology companies begin to look more and more like one another, the relatively agnostic approach of many content-oriented companies to technology may allow them to move more quickly on many such acquisition and marketing opportunities.