The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs is a great blog. It usually has some really funny stuff. On the weekend it posted the best commentary on the proposed Microsoft/Yahoo deal I’ve seen. The article is well worth reading but here’s some of the choice quotes:
It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster.
But here’s the really dark part of all this. [Ballmer] knows it won’t work. He has to know this. He’s not stupid. [...] He has a mindset that was formed in Detroit, where he grew up. He’s a Big Three automaker kind of guy. And this is a Big Three move. It’s Ford buying Jaguar and Land Rover and Volvo because they can’t think of anything else to do.
Oh, and synergy. Yeah. They’ll talk a lot about synergy. You know, like when you hook together a bunch of data centers that run on completely different technology stacks.
Scariest to me is that in all the articles I’ve seen the one thing Ballmer keeps bringing up is how he’ll be able to save $1 billion a year in costs. Are you kidding me? Is this Microsoft or Dunder Mifflin? I mean, I don’t doubt he could save a billion a year. But it says a lot about the kind of company Microsoft has become that this is what they’re thinking about.
“Imagine a circus act in which two enormous, clumsy, awkward elephants that don’t really like each other are supposed to mate while riding on skateboards. Now imagine that it is your job, you lucky bastard, to be one of the little circus clowns standing alongside trying to make this extremely unnatural and unholy act take place.”
I need a drink.