By now, I assume almost everyone in the industry has heard about Microsoft offering to buy Yahoo! for $44.6 billion. And thanks to a friend who gave me a heads-up on the interesting news, I have spent the past hour thinking what would/could happen should the deal be successful. Anyone can tell that the competition between Microsoft and Google will become more intense and that Microsoft will try its best to become the #1 dominant player in the search industry. But let’s take a look at the situation from a different stand point, with a grain of salt.
- Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail will be merged into a single powerful free email system called Hothoo!
- Flickr will be called Microsoft Live Flick and still photos will be converted to Microsoft Live videos automatically.
- Your computer will take photos of you in front of your computer every hour (provided that you are using Windows Vista) and upload them onto your “Microsoft Live Flick” account. This will happen automatically without you doing anything.
- The combination of Microsoft Live search + Yahoo! search will be so intelligent that not only will it be able to handle expressions that are natural for the human, it will also give you recommendations like a best friend. For example, if you were searching for Thai takeaways, it will tell you that you just had Thai yesterday, and that you might like to try Spanish tonight, and hence search for Spanish takeaways.
- Microsoft Live maps, in an attempt to beat Google maps street view, will display personal information at a street-level view, such as names of the people living at a particular place, what computer they use, the total time spent online with a link to their “Microsoft Live Flick” account, etc.
- And lastly, some of the redundant services are too challenging to merge that they will have to cease to exist. No more Windows Live Mesenger, no more Yahoo! Messenger. Employers rejoice!
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