8th
Free Idea for Microsoft
I had lunch with one of the best VC’s in the valley today. At that lunch we were speaking about all sorts of business models. We spoke a little about the MSFT/YHOO deal and how that went. I strongly felt from the beginning that MSFT buying YHOO for even $33 per share (around $40+ billion total) was just an absurd amount of money for what they would get out of it.
Anyway so we came up with something that MSFT can do with some of the money that they were going to spend on YHOO. Create a program that only allows the user to use MSFT products, for example you could only search on Microsoft Live, you would block everyone else. Now why would someone download and use this, because Microsoft would pay them $100 per year to do it. For half the price of Yahoo say $20 billion, Microsoft could pay 200 million people to use its substandard services for a year. Then lets say that they invest $3-4 billion during that year in making there stuff kick ass they might not only keep their paid users but actually gain other users.
With the savings of doing this model (a little over $20 billion) they could then buy up almost every company in Silicon Valley and integrate all of those cool offerings into their core services.
Sort of a joke but when you think about how much $40 billion is, it makes you think of all of the other creative things that you could do with that money.