大象传媒

Yahoo hullabaloo

• Robert Peston
• 1 Feb 08, 04:45 PM

The hoots of joy from deal-starved Wall Street could be heard all over New York this morning.

I'm filming a 大象传媒 Two documentary here about the causes and aftermath of the credit crunch.

And the absurd euphoria generated by tilt at was not a healthy sign. It sounded to me like a mob of desperate bankers and investors frantically clutching at lifebelts made of straw.

The fact is it's only one deal.

It would be big, though hardly mega.

And Microsoft is one of the few companies on the planet that generates so much cash that it's wholly insulated from the drought in money markets

In other words, it would be silly to extrapolate from this deal anything terribly positive about improvements in business confidence or the possibility that more takeovers are on the way.

The only deals in town - bar this Yahoo one - involve commodity companies like , near-bankrupt banks or insurers and the moneybags state investment arms of Asian or Middle Eastern economies.

And that is not going to change in a hurry.

As the latest confirm, the momentum behind the deceleration in the world's biggest economy is worryingly strong.

The Microsoft bear hug on Yahoo is a model of predatory opportunism.

Yahoo's latest results were seen by many of its shareholders as confirmation that as an independent business it is a wasting asset.

But, in seeming contradiction to that view, it has also become fashionable to suggest that Google's days of total invincibility and dominance of the search business may be drawing to a close

Google's last set of figures were only good by the standards of mortal businesses, rather than superlative.

So the Microsoft message is that Yahoo crunched together with its MSN might just capture some market share.

But, to quote the management consultant's cliche, if the deal happens its success or failure will all be in the execution.

As for , it will probably see the deal as an example of what I think of as being a Buffettism, namely that putting together two bad businesses usually creates one very big bad business.

I would verify that I have just re-purposed an Omaha aphorism, but am powerless to do so because my clunking BlackBerry won't let me access Google.

Which tells me that when it comes to the search business, Google is more than just the market leader. It defines its industry in a way that will be hard to break, even for a Yahoo fuelled by Microsoft's knowhow and rivers of cash.

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