Everyone has an opinion about the steps that new CEO Carol Bartz must take to turn Yahoo!
To be fair, Munster also suggests various logical purchases like Twitter, FriendFeed, and Gawker Media. But what would Yahoo! do with an old-school newspaper company?
Sure, NYT owns the iconic About.com reference site, runs the popular online version of its namesake daily paper, and manages several well-read blogs. None of that would justify Yahoo!'s purchase of a company with an enterprise value of $2 billion.
As with most newspaper companies, fading circulation and advertising budgets have left their mark on NYT. Even Google
My real beef with Munster's suggestion is that Yahoo! excels (among other areas) as an aggregator of data. From Yahoo! News to Yahoo! Finance to the Yahoo! Mail landing page, the company offers up headlines from a wide range of sources. How unbiased would the company appear if it owned one of its leading news providers?
Search-engine giants like Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft
I realize that Bartz will be pressured tonight when she hosts her first earnings conference call at Yahoo!. Investors will want direction, optimism, and confidence. Getting the company's hands all smudgy with newsprint would be a bad move on all three of those fronts.
The world according to Yahoo!: