A Technorati-Microsoft Deal?

In the new, exciting Web 2.0 game of who's going to acquire who, Blogspotting's Stephen Baker tossed out the idea that Microsoft could buy Technorati. Frankly, I do think this deal is going to go down because Microsoft seems sofocused these days on ensuring its own applications are Web-ified and work seamlesly together. This approach is fairly easy to glean from Ray Ozzie's Christmas message in which he talks about service-enhanced sofware, Vista and Office 12. If Microsoft were serious about the blogosphere and RSS, it would have been in the market snapping up many of the hot start-ups that Yahoo, Google, et al acquired such as Flickr and del.icio.us. Microsoft has MSN Spaces but the company is far more engrossed in transforming itself from an old-style client-based software maker into an online application service provider with tight integration between its products. Of course, Microsoft has more than $30-billion of cash so it can buy anything it wants. But the fact it has done little shopping suggests Microsoft has bigger strategic priorities – most of them organic – so it makes little sense to distract itself with small acquisitions (even if Robert Scoble is “encouraging” them to do so).

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Anonymous

Sifry is part of the Linux fan club. Before Technorati, he use to be CTO of Linuxcare [http://www.linuxcare.com/]. In my talks with him, he wasn't even willing to consider Microsoft technologies. That could be a show stopper.
Stuart MacDonald

Technorati feels waaaay out there as an MSFT purchase. Super unlikely. They'd look at it and say “that's not really hard to do” and try to do it themselves if they think it's a strong business to participate in — that's how those folks are wired, right or wrong. Mostly wrong as it has turned out in many cases, but that's how they are culturally. GOOG? Nope, don't think so, because they worship at the altar of the algorithm and would see big issues in scalability and quality of user tagged data (rightly so, possibly). So who? Well, it would have to be a media company wanting a head start in having a bevy of categorized blogs to offer advertisers as ultra targeted ad vehicles, and preferably one able to snap it into a service(s) with a whack of reach already. NWS or YHOO are my leading candidates, with IACI as a possible outsider.
Of course, with the coming wave of ad dollars and growing interest in blogs as a home for some of these, you can totally imagine them figuring out how to grow reach, how to do the ad distribution thing themselves and then taking it public.
- Stuart