C'mon, Steve, What Do You Really Want?

David Card | May 19, 2008, 10:07 PM

The speculation-o-meter just reached "absurd." Here's what Microsoft needs:

- Critical-mass marketplace of ad buyers
- Possibility to combine search marketplace, display marketplace, and direct premium ad sales, because Google can't do that
- Many, many eyeballs to put its search technology and marketplace in front of
- Potential critical-mass communications and, possibly, social media user base to put its platform technology in front of
- Cloud-computing enterprise software platforms and/or user bases (less important than the consumer stuff, where MSFT lags badly)

If you see a way Redmond gets more than one of those via some of these silly speculations, then perhaps they're not silly. I don't.

Steve, buy Yahoo. Buy Facebook. But this talk of bogus joint ventures doesn't dent the Google armor, as far as I can see.