Last Friday's Wall Street Journal's Section B featured the headline piece, "New Tech Alliances Signal More Scrambling Ahead." Indeed.
It seems to me that it pretty much reinforces the various shifts in momentum and strength that have been evident for the last few years. To wit, Google is attacking Microsoft by pressing its advantage with a weakened Dell. Dell will now ship Google software pre-loaded on the computers it sells.
Yahoo will sell ads on eBay pages in the US, and correspondingly promote the latter's PayPal service on its own site. On this one, I'd say two troubled non-competitors are allying to maintain strength while not heading in the other's direction. Yahoo doesn't do auctions, and eBay doesn't do broad-spectrum information services, email, ads, nor groups.
The most predictable one, of course, is Microsoft. It is buying MotionBridge, a company involved in search software for mobile phones. Ballmer and Gates, you've got to love them. Financial indicators, market share data, no empirical evidence will stop these two from having fun at their shareholders' expense, will it?
Of all the linkups mentioned in the WSJ piece, the only one that doesn't make sense is Microsoft's. It doesn't remove a major competitor. It doesn't strengthen an existing product/market position. It's a "hail Mary" pass reminiscent of the firm's acquisition of WebTV. Does anyone else recall that one? I think it sank out of sight about three years ago. It was supposed to be Microsoft's easy pole vault into the living room, via a wireless keyboard and your TV screen.
Overall, the usual suspects have behaved as expected. The smarties at Google have exploited someone else's weakness and made further inroads onto desktops. Yahoo and eBay, perennial second-tier tech giants, keep out of each other's way, perhaps mutually fend off Google a bit, and don't give away anything valuable for nothing. Only Microsoft continues to be the Lone Ranger, straying ever further from its simple core strengths of desktop operating systems, applications, and browsers.
I doubt that any of these deals will markedly change current trajectories for the companies involved. They may avert slower growth, in the case of Google. Or even, in the case of Yahoo and eBay, protect each a bit more from competitive threats by Google. For Microsoft, it's just another expensive step on the way downhill- business as usual.
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