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Imagine There’s a MicroHoo (It’s Easy if You Try)

ballmer-yang

OK, we Photoshopped it, but only because we could not get our head around what the official Yahoo/Microsoft post-merger picture might look like.

With news that the pair were in informal talks, first broken by CNET, Boomtown still could not conceive of Yahoo (YHOO) CEO and Co-Founder Jerry Yang trading high-fives with Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer, given Yang has thus far behaved as if the unsolicited bid from the software giant was akin to eating a bowl of worms.

But, in the words of the immortal John Lennon, “Imagine all the people/Living life in peace.” Thus we took that famous picture of AOL’s Steve Case and Time Warner’s (TWX) Jerry Levin (they seemed so happy at the time–who knew?) at the dawn of that dog of a merger and went to town.

BoomTown has always been an avid student of those always curious post-acquisition/merger shots that get taken as the first public visual expression of a deal.

For example, the genuine one, pictured below, of the Bebo/AOL union announced yesterday, with Bebo president Joanna Shields shaking hands with AOL CEO Randy Falco, while AOL President Ron Grant stands nearby, seems unusually awkward and uncomfortable to me, for example.

Is a picture worth a thousand words or are looks deceiving? You decide.

bebo

Comments

  1. Gawd, that tongue of Ballmer’s is horrendously ugly.

    Posted by rod sandcones at March 14th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
  2. kara, your photoshop skills are about as good as mine.

    which is to say, don’t quit that day job ;)

    (liked the headline tho)

    Posted by dave mcclure at March 14th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
  3. Kara, when this whole mess is over, you just have to make a compilation of your posts about this. Either as a book for print on Blurb.com (with accompanying DVD for the media files), or as an ebook.

    Love all your posts on this issue, and the posts may may end up being required reading in some B-School class or entrepreneurs.

    ‘Caught in the headlights: musings from the Yahoo! merger’ seems like a good name for said book.

    Posted by John Obeto at March 15th, 2008 at 1:24 pm

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About Kara

Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference.

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Ethics Statement

Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.

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