CS and the City

News on the Microsoft front today is Steve Berkowitz, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online business group, getting the boot. His replacement: this guy. His name is Brian McAndrews. He’s the former CEO of aQuantive, that big ad agency MS bought months ago.

Brian has a Forbes.com profile, no Wikipedia page.

I cannot imagine how a company full of such delightful and intelligent folk can be led by management so disconnected with reality. I’m a generous guy, so I’ll wave the consulting fee this one time.

Microsoft, the reason your online division isn’t profitable is because your products are mediocre on a good day and no one is interested in using them, and not because you don’t have enough ads on them already. Putting an ad executive at the top of the division is about the worst thing you could possibly do.

Now those people protesting the merger on Flickr have something to be genuinely concerned about.

Besides yesterday being the most undeserved snow day in Waterloo history, it was also MS’s turn to drop a mighty news making bombshell: Microsoft bid $44.6 Billion for Yahoo. I figured Dr. Evil would be appropriate.

This is the sort of news that gets my geek blood pumping. An event like this sends millions of different wavelengths of possibility flying in every direction, interfering constructively and destructively in peaks of likely outcomes. The analysits are doing their absolute best to help point them out too: Will Google bid too? Maybe News Corp. will. What does Microsoft gain? Is this the end of Google’s dominance? Will Yahoo employees even want to work for Microsoft? It might be better than getting canned outright.

To be fair, Yahoo has some great properties that Microsoft would be well guided to leave the hell alone. Let’s see here: Flickr, Upcoming, Yahoo Mail, Finance, Music, IM, etc. Of course, this would only compound the absolute most frustrating thing about working at Microsoft: If you’re working on a project, chances are there are at least two other groups in the company doing the same thing. Adding a parallel internet product offering stack is not going to make the situation better. Even if Microsoft’s essentially admitting defeat in the race for internet viewer keystrokes, you can be sure it’ll be Yahoo products that get the axe before equivalent Microsoft ones.

What I wouldn’t give to be back at Google when Marissa Mayer gives the “This is our position” talk to the PM corp. Or to be a fly on the wall as Jerry Yang decides what to do with the offer, or Steve Ballmer waits for the response. It’s hard to under emphasize the effect this offer will have on the tech landscape. I’d be wise to actually make the effort to organize my thoughts and the ones on the other news site. Somebody will write a book about this and make a whole lot of money. Might as well be me. I sure as hell didn’t make any when Yahoo!’s stock jumped 50% yesterday.