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14th September 2011

Coalition of the Losers

For months now I’ve remarked that the technology landscape could use some serious consolidation. There’s a strong case to be made for the formation of a “Coalition of the Losers” - Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo! - who have utterly failed to keep pace with the last decade of innovation in the consumer internet space. By pooling their resources, maybe they can actually save their crumbling empires.

If I were a senior business development executive at Facebook, I would see this as the opportunity of a lifetime. Facebook has been hemmed out of mobile by Apple and Google. Their single greatest hope is dominance of the display advertising business, but that has yet to materialize - and the biggest competitor to Google’s DoubleClick Ad Exchange in that space is Yahoo!. 

I would form a grand alliance leading Research In Motion, Nokia, Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo! to create a unified strategy across web, mobile, and social media. Then I’d go take the fight to Apple and Google.