Tech Merger Week 2008

Amazon and Audible, $300 Million--they want to kill iTunes. They will fail. Audible is a nice little company, but the audiobook market is never going to be big. I think Amazon just bought them to kill the Audible/iTunes partnership. Plus, as Amazon wants to be a player in the downloadable content market, it is embarrassing for them to not have the corner of the downloadable audiobook market. Books, after all, are their bread and butter.

Microsoft and Yahoo, $44.6 Billion--they want to kill Google. They will fail. MSN is a jumble of disconnected parts with no vision or clear branding. Yahoo is a jumble of disconnected parts with little vision or clear branding. Actually, on second thought, they are perfect together! What makes them think that when you put those together you will improve their weak vision and branding? Google should be celebrating this move. Now instead of two semi-competent competitors, they have one incompetent (albeit larger) one.

This could be the start of a flood of mergers, because that's the way tech works... Look for more soon. Netflix? TiVo? Sony? Google? Facebook?

Someone should give me some of those millions and billions to supply this advice.