So the chatter about someone buying/acquiring/joint venturing with AOL continues today. Seems there just might be
something in the works. Problem is, no one seems to know if it's going to be Google, Yahoo!, or MSN that closes the
deal.
Russell Beattie is a Yahoo! (in the employee sense - nothing personal) and
Danny Sullivan is… well Danny knows more about search and the search
market in his little finger than most of us will ever grok. They're sparring today on
Russell's blog. In a post today, Russ wrote:
"All this said, the MSN deal doesn't make any sense to me at all. I guess Microsoft is serious about online services
and are willing to do whatever they need to accelerate. But folding in AOL into MSN in some sort of JV with Time
Warner? Wacky, desperate and ultimately a complete failure. The "SOL" in MSOL would stand for something considerably
different than they'd think."
and Danny replied in the comments:
"The MSN deal makes plenty of sense from a search perspective. AOL has no tech on the web side, no ad serving for
search ads. MSN has audience, but despite the tech investment, it's not growing search side. AOL's actually gone up a
tiny bit, without the ad spending that MSN's had to do. And getting all those AOL people who still are hanging in there
with AOL's software, tied into your search, your search ads. That makes a lot of sense."
Two observations… actually three:
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I sure do love reading folks who write well and think through what they want to say before hitting the "Post" or "Submit" button.
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Notice the lack of arrogance, bad temper, self-righteousness, or defensiveness in these ripostes? This is professional, courteous debate folks - something becoming all too rare here in the blog space.
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I tend to agree with Danny's analysis. I think if there are real synergies to be gained by an acquisition, merger, etc., MSN is in the best position to leverage AOL's assets without compromising their own brand.
