Trying to put two companies together almost always leads to tears, the destruction of value and, of course, job losses, and the result is never quite as good as the separate pieces.
Bearing that in mind, let's examine the task that lies ahead if Microsoft succeeds in its audacious - and expensive - bid for Yahoo. The reason for the bid is clear: Yahoo is wounded, having announced financial results on Tuesday which, for the eighth quarter in a row, disappointed analysts. Microsoft, meanwhile, desperately wants to reinvent itself to meet the new online world, where people access a world of services on the internet, not through packaged software on a PC on their desk.
The two companies are best known for their free email services, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail (the latter acquired by Microsoft 10 years ago). Yahoo probably has more than 300m active accounts; Hotmail has more than 280m active accounts; while Google's Gmail service is a distant third, with about 50m accounts. (Many of those may be duplicates; I'm on all three myself.)
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