我相信這次 Microsoft 和 Yahoo! 的結盟，執行面上摩擦會小很多，因為：
Bartz: A good share of the people here worked for Qi, so it’s not like they’re unknown. That actually was comforting to me, even though I’ve never met Qi. I hear nothing but good remarks about him. The other thing that’s kind of fascinating is that Joanne Bradford runs our advertising markets and she was…
Ballmer: … sales and programming for Microsoft.
Bartz: So there’s a lot of transfer of personal knowledge back and forth. While all deals are chance because somebody wants something and somebody wants something else, people have really come together in the right spirit. That doesn’t mean there won’t be issues. But Steve and I have a good relationship and we have to start with that. That will reflect down to the organization, because I don’t think either one of us will take any bulls–t from anybody. If either side starts playing (games), we just place a call to each other and the bulls—t meter comes on, right?
我也很喜歡某分析師說的這句話：
As Krans put it in a research note Tuesday: "Microsoft gets its milk without buying the cow."
Carol Bartz 針對 Yahoo! 股價跌 12% 的回應：
Bartz: I think two things happen. One is some people wanted upfront money. I wanted a high (traffic acquisition cost) rate, because I want a revenue line — in fact, what this deal has given me is virtually all my revenue, or 88 percent of the revenue, with no cost, and so I needed to be able to focus this company on other aspects of the business, and let Microsoft — who we know is maniacal about the search business, so they can take a run against Google. So I wanted to ride their coattails, so I think people forgot all of the money we were saving here and tried to focus just on an upfront payment — which to me, a billion dollars, I’ve got $4 billion, another billion after taxes and I get 50 basis points of interest, it doesn’t really help me from an operating standpoint.
The second thing is, you know, I think people just didn’t think about the timing. You know, everybody who was assuming the last few weeks that there was going to be a deal probably assumed by next quarter we’d be saving a boatload of money and the stock would go up, and they could jump in or out or whatever they wanted to do. So when we said, gee, six months of regulatory and two years after that, I think people went "Aaacck!"
火爆浪子 (?!) 和火爆娘子 (?!) 真是絕配 
：
Q: Steve, are you going to start dropping a few f-bombs just to make Carol feel more comfortable?
Bartz: No! No! OK, this is how it’s going to work.
Ballmer: Ha! Ha! Carol’s going to jump up and down!
Bartz: I’m going to jump up and down and I CAN YELL JUST AS LOUD AS STEVE!
Q: I’m sorry, Carol, what’d you say, you cut out there.
Ballmer: (laughing) You heard her.
Q: Maybe Carol, you’ll need to jump around on stage and say, "Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft."
Bartz: I can, I can. And I can eat funny food, too.
Ballmer: We’re both chronically on diets.
Bartz: (Laughing) Chronic misfits. …
Jason Calacanis 看來非常不爽 Yahoo! 切腹這件事，不過他自己也搞了一個 Mahalo 人力搜尋引擎，立場算比較不中立：
The once proud warrior of the internet space laid down its sword, knelt at the feet of Microsoft and gutted itself today. (很生動)
All that being said, Microsoft’s obsession with taking Yahoo’s second place position and adding it to their 3rd place position is not an indication that it’s time to sell. Far from it. When Microsoft is interested in a space it is a clear sign that you should be investing in it–not selling it.
To say it clearly: Microsoft does not enter a market unless it’s important, huge and on the way to becoming even bigger. Microsoft is the buy sign, not the sell sign. The people at Microsoft are brilliant and not to be underestimated–history has shown this to be true.
Ballmer 解釋了為什麼不是 upfront cash deal：
"It could not be all up front, that I could not do," he said. "If everything is all up front, Yahoo! has no motivation to drive searches. I like it better if [the deal] gives us both ongoing incentives" to build the search business.
Yahoo! 也還是能 access 搜尋引擎內容，讓 Display Ads 變得更精準：
And Yahoo will be able to tap into records of searches for its own purposes, like monitoring the online behavior of anonymous users to more efficiently place online display advertisements.
最後一點是我個人的小小想法。不知道各方分析師是否估算過 Google 搜尋市占率每掉一個百分比，對營收的影響有多大？微軟、雅虎進行搜尋合作後，之後的競爭意義，將是從之前 「Bing 搶了 Yahoo! 搜尋的多少多少市場份額 (確實也是如此，Google 於 Bing 推出後市占率仍持續成長。)」轉變到「Bing + Yahoo-Bing 搶了 Google 多少多少市場份額」。這對 Google 來說有兩方面重大影響。1) 前面提到的槓桿效應：Google 市佔下滑一點，對營收的衝擊等於是乘上好幾倍。2) Google 被迫要花更多心思照顧搜尋引擎事業，勢必分散投資在 Apps, OS Platform 等新業務上的注意力。
直搗黃龍大概就是這個意思。
souces:
TechFlash
Forbes
BusinessWeek
The Jason Calicanis Web
NY Times
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