Broadband Developments

Google announced on the Google blog this morning that they’re dropping the deal with Yahoo. Instead of standing up to government antitrust scrutiny, they’ve chosen to simply walk away. Personally I think they’ll wait for a “friendlier” government and try again next year; after all they’ve been calling Obama “the Google president” internally for months. However, let’s pretend for a second that doesn’t happen. Google has really left yahoo at the altar for good…

Where does this really leave yahoo? Yahoo must have been counting on this $800 million in revenue to help it float while three feet of sunshine himself, jerry yang, tries to rebuild the failed empire. yahoo may have no choice in the end but to either be acquired at a fraction of what Microsoft offered earlier this year or go the way of pets.com; just another internet company turned bad joke at Bucks. After botching the MSFT deal, yang lost a lot credibility but it was mostly recovered by the Google deal. With that falling apart this morning what does he have to stand on as a leader? For all the smoke and mirrors yahoo is worth significantly less on all levels than before jerry’s grand plan in the post-Semel years.

jerry yang, meet Jonathan Abrams… I think you’ll have a lot in common soon.

UPDATE: Bloomberg just launched this story “Yahoo May Embrace Microsoft Without Google’s Help” making some of the same points I did above. Looks like I’m not the only one thinking this way…