Maven Mapper's

Analysts are befuddled as they attempt to understand Microsoft's next move.  One analyst claims that Microsoft will try and purchase part of Yahoo!

``What Microsoft is most interested in is getting that Yahoo subscriber base,'' said Brendan Barnicle, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities in Portland, Oregon. Microsoft may have realized that it would face challenges in integrating the whole of Yahoo, he said.

Bloomberg.com

The problem with this scenario is that Microsoft already has a base of customers.  Lest we forget, Microsoft has their software operating on a super majority of personal and business computers around the world.  Buying a redundant subset of subscribers of their own customer data seems ludicrous.

It goes to show how analysts are either grasping at straws or trying to offer up a smoke screen for their own purposes.  Microsoft definitely does not need this information nor the subscription that comes with them. 

What Microsoft does need is a finger on the pulse of search and internet advertising.  Something that Yahoo! even has been steadily bleeding out to Google for almost a decade.  The concept that Microsoft can improve or save their own business by getting a list of customers invokes images of a back alley deal with a list of dot matrix computer print outs locked up in an aluminum Zero Halliburton metal suit case hand cuffed to a Yahoo! executive's wrist.   Obviously, Microsoft's solution is not that easy, but it is fairly transparent.

Its not about the list, its about search.