The Microsoft –Yahoo Rumors Are Back

This time, the rumors have some possibility though, as the rumor I read about this is from long time Microsoft-watcher, Mary-Jo Foley. In her column on ZDNet, she states that Microsoft top employees, along with the top employees of Yahoo, will be attending “All Things D” 7, and the Microsofties are going to announce the new search entity.

If I were going to bet what happens next, here’s what I’d wager:

Microsoft and Yahoo announce some kind of jointly-managed company that will trade ad sales for search engine placement. This “MicroHoo” won’t be a merged Microsoft-Yahoo. Instead it will be some kind of ad/search entity.

Microsoft will rebrand Live Search as Yahoo. (Sure, Bing — one of the original three names Microsoft has been considering for its Live Search rebrand since 2008 — still could be the final name of the new version of Live Search that is currently codenamed “Kumo.” But in spite of the growing possibility that Bing would become the new Microsoft search brand, Microsoft recently lost its trademark request for Bing….)

The newly rebranded Yahoo/Bing (or whatever it ends up being called) moves to second place in the search-share wars. Google continues to dominate with 60+ percent and the Yahoo/Bing thing comes in around 25 percent.

Microsoft’s newest iteration of its search engine is expected to go live on or around June 2. At the same time, the approximately $100 million ad campaign designed to get people to forget (if they ever knew in the first place) that Live Search existed is expected to kick off.

Mary-Jo spends most of her time analyzing this stuff, and has been right about things more often than not.

After all, if you look at the progression of the company, (most) every major change in the company has been because of an acquisition. Microsoft buys its innovation. It bought DOS, and then tweaked it. It bought Hotmail, and then tweaked it. It bought Giant Software’s Antispyware, and tweaked it into Windows Defender.

So why not slowly turn Yahoo into Kumo?

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