The Local Angle on Microsoft-Yahoo!

My “Locals Only” column today elaborates on my preliminary thinking about the local aspects of the Microsoft bid and the challenges there:

Last Friday, shortly after the Microsoft bid for Yahoo was made public, Danny Sullivan and I had an opportunity to discuss the proposed acquisition with Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of strategic partnerships for Microsoft. Our questions to Mehdi often returned to post-acquisition “integration” issues. I brought up local, maps and mobile as areas where both companies had made significant investments but also had significant duplication and redundancy. Mehdi responded, “We have not made decisions at that level, such as what to do with maps or mobile products. Every alternative is on the table. We will evaluate all those options and decide. We’ll pick whatever we think is the best options.”

Fair enough.

Yet, in many ways, local is a perfect microcosm of the entire issue of product integration and the challenges surrounding determination of what brands or properties to retain and which to fold. Assuming Microsoft is successful with its bid, it won’t have to act quickly to promote or shutter any of the combined company’s local properties. But executives will be making choices during the transition about where to deploy resources and thus picking “winners” and “losers.” Here’s a tour of the local properties and the choices that may need to be made.

Read more of this post at Search Engine Land.