What Steve Jobs Might Say to Microsoft’s Bid on Yahoo

What might Steve Jobs think about Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo? Here’s a hint.

Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Computer, has had his own experience of seeing Microsoft enter a market and overwhelm the original innovator (the Apple Macintosh) with a similar, competing product (Windows). Jobs regards the Web as “the defining social moment for computing.” He foresees all current mail-order commerce (15 percent of the retail economy), and more, shifting to the Web. He approves of the provocative fact that on the Web, the smallest company can look like the largest, and regards the Web as having “breathed a whole new generation of life into personal computing.” Steve Jobs is also both a perennial critic and partner of Microsoft and its monolithic tendencies: “The Web is incredibly exciting, because it is the fulfillment of a lot of our dreams, that the computer would ultimately not be primarily a device for computation, but metamorphosis into a device for communication. And with the Web that’s finally happening. And secondly, it’s exciting because Microsoft doesn’t own it, and therefore there is a tremendous amount of innovation happening.”

That quote is from Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet by Stephen Segaller.

Google has already come out and made a the statement on their blog as to why Microsoft acquiring Yahoo would be a very bad thing. To sum it up, if you think of massive sum of IMing and Email accounts Microsoft owns though MSN, and you were to add those to the substantial amount Microsoft would be gaining from Yahoo you will find Microsoft left with a large chunk of the Internet’s communications.

We’ve all seen what happened when Microsoft gained too much control over browsers or operating systems. I don’t think that needs too much more explanation.

Now to the quote, why does Steve Jobs think the Internet is exciting? “Because Microsoft doesn’t own it.” To take words out of Steve’s mouth, if Microsoft were to acquire Yahoo it could make a fundamental basis of the Internet crumble to pieces. Again, the reason the Internet is moving forward and innovating is because Microsoft (or any other single company such as Microsoft) doesn’t own it.

In my opinion, if Microsoft does acquire Yahoo it could very well mean some of today’s developing Internet companies and technologies could be trumped by Microsoft’s need to “make sure things are just right.” Even for the mobile device user, technologies that are moving us forward could be inhibited if Microsoft chose to make that level of influence.

My every hope is a company with the fundamentals of Google or Apple will acquire Yahoo and make good use of its resources. We all know Yahoo is on the decline and will be acquired by some company, but does it have to be Microsoft?

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