14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft Chief Executive Officer, Steve Ballmer, has confirmed that the Yahoo brand will live. The Redmond company came out into the open with a $44.6 billion unsolicited acquisition proposal for Yahoo after almost two years of failed private negotiations. On the same day when Microsoft went public with the big, one of the questions faced by Kevin Johnson, President, Platform & Services Division, was about the future of the Yahoo brand.
Microsoft obviously will have to deal with a consistent overlapping problem when swallowing Yahoo, from services (Yahoo Search - Live Search), to products (Yahoo Messenger - Windows Live Messenger) and to people. "Look, the Yahoo! brand is a great brand. We love the Yahoo! Brand," Johnson stated at the time, pointing out that at least at the leadership level the talent from Yahoo will survive and transition to Microsoft.
But when it comes to people, the Redmond company has in fact to deal with the clash between two different corporate cultures. In the takeover bid, Microsoft is faced with the possibility of Yahoo's top talent migrating to Google, also an Internet-centric company, but that has the advantage in delivering success after success where both Microsoft and Yahoo have seen only failures.
In the end, Yahoo is not about single, discordant aspects. And while products, services and the audience will shift with ease, not the same can be said about the approximately 14,000 Yahoo workforce. Swinging them suddenly toward Microsoft might cause some of them to land over at Google, but also other companies, more close to the Silicon Valley model.
Ballmer gave guarantees that the Yahoo brand would survive. Whether it will be connected with just the remnants of the products and services that will not be swallowed into Windows Live and MSN, or not it still remains to be seen. Microsoft is yet to formulate a strategy in this regard. The Redmond company's CEO only revealed that he expected to benefit from $1 billion in operating efficiencies by melting away the Yahoo and Microsoft workforces, coming close to the 100,000 employees mark.
"A key synergy we've identified in this combination is really about expanded R&D capability. It doesn't make sense to have thousands of engineers at Yahoo working on a search index, thousands of engineers at Microsoft working on the same search index. By combining, we can have one team of people across the two companies working on the search index, and then have others continue to focus on areas where we've defined differentiation in search. New search verticals and expanded user experience for search," Johnson explained.