Burnham:Microsoft/Yahoo: A Bad Deal For Silicon Valley: Take II

""That said, I still think that Microsoft's acquisition of Yahoo is still a net negative from an M&A perspective. Yes, it's certainly not the end of the world, but on the whole and on the average it's never a positive thing to have an active, well endowed, acquirer removed from the mix. Yahoo may not have been buying 50 start-ups a year, but they were still one of the most active Internet acquirers not just in terms of deals, but also in terms of bids. Indeed the most important party in any deal is not the actual buyer but the second place bidder and Yahoo had seemed to make a career out of being the second place bidder lately. Finally, thanks to its huge market capital, massive traffic and strong (although not relative to Google) monetization platform, Yahoo is one of the few Internet acquirers who have the luxury of being able to easily drop $50-$100M on a "feature" without really thinking about it. I totally agree with Mark that if you are building a "feature" with the intent of getting acquired by Yahoo or whoever, you were likely doomed to failure a long time ago, but at same time, the cynic in me has seen a lot of "features" get funded in the valley over the past two years often under the assumption that if they get enough eyeballs one of the big three M&A fairies will swoop in and drop $100M just to "keep up with the Joneses"."