In the best tie-up since that time I made myself a Vodka and skim milk out of sheer desperation, AOL and Yahoo may become one. It’d be just like Voltron, if Voltron were a rotten egg and a ruptured spleen.
As Bloomberg reports, the two companies are currently sniffing around each others’ hindquarters like two mealy strays. Specifically, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, whose vision for a content empire has proven positively Magoo-ian, has been speaking with Yahoo’s investment banking and private equity advisers about what a tower of suck awesome the two companies could create together.
This won’t be AOLhoo’s first three-legged tango; Armstrong made merger overtures last year as well, but was rebuffed by just-ousted Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz. With her departure, though, the dream of YAOLhoo survives.
Why, exactly, is this a bad idea? Look, it’s not as though you’re making an all-star team from the Browns and the Cardinals and hoping they can keep up with the Packers. You’re taking an “internet portal” that doesn’t really do anything, a weirdly undefined content purveyor, and mashing them up into a big vague pile of who cares? Put another way: mixing yellow and blue gets you green, sure. But mixing shit and shit gets you a slightly different shade of shit.
Anyhow, these are just talks, lots of due diligence to be done, etc. And nothing may come of it. Actually, scratch that: nothing’s going to come of it either way. [Bloomberg]