2011年 09月 11日 日曜日 14:14

http://fastcache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2011/09/yahaol.jpg

In the best tie-up since that time I made myself a Vodka and skim milk out of sheer desperation, Aol and Yahoo may merge. It'd be just like Voltron, if Voltron were a rotten egg riding atop a ruptured spleen.

As Bloomberg reports, the two companies are currently sniffing around each others' hindquarters like two mealy strays. Specifically, Aol CEO Tim Armstrong, whose vision for a content empire has proven positively Magoo-ian, has been speaking with Yahoo's investment banking and private equity advisers about what a tower of (suck) awesome the two companies could create together.

This won't Aolhoo's first three-legged tango; Armstrong made merger overtures last year as well, but was rebuffed by just-ousted Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz. With her departure, though, the dream of Yaolhoo survives.

Why, exactly, is this a bad idea? Look, it's not as though you're making an all-star team from the Browns and the Cardinals and hoping they can keep up with the Packers. You're taking an "internet portal" that doesn't really do anything, a weirdly undefined content purveyor, and mashing them up into a big vague pile of who cares? Put another way: mixing yellow and blue gets you green, sure. But mixing shit and shit gets you a slightly different shade of shit.

This is something Aol, of all people, should probably know better than anyone! Remember Aol/Time Warner? One of the worst co-minglings of the modern age, and one that caused a lot of fine people to lose their jobs and both companies to lose lots of money. Yahoo, in case you were too busy losing massive ground to Google in search while all that went down, you're going to want to check out the file footage.

Anyhow, these are just talks, lots of due diligence to be done, etc. And nothing may come of it. Actually, scratch that: nothing's going to come of it either way. [Bloomberg]

http://gizmodo.com/5838830/aol-and-yahoo-might-merge-into-one-giant-clusternut-of-awful