Microsoft Buys aQuantive for $6 Billion

They finally stopped whining and put their money where their mouth is. In response to Google’s $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick, Microsoft buys ad network aQuantive for $6 billion cash.

Yup, double the money. How dramatic. Yahoo, on the other hand, smartly responded by snapping up a bargain with Right Media.

While this is Microsoft’s biggest purchase to date, they’ve still got $35 billion left in the bank. Sure, they can’t think of original moves — but they can still spend money to copy moves.

I’m still not impressed. All the money in the world can’t make up for an inability to ship. Microsoft adCenter still can’t reach me as a publisher.

Yahoo’s New Mission Statement: We Are Not Google

In response to Google’s new tagline, Yahoo retools its mission statement to reconcile its recent social media acquisitions with its origin as a human-edited directory: To connect people to their passions, communities, and the world’s knowledge. Clearly, Yahoo wants to come off as more “human” than Google, whose mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

With this mission statement, Yahoo tries to differentiate itself from Google on three levels:

1) Man versus machine — “Passions” versus “information”.
2) Push versus pull — “Connecting” people to things versus making things “universally accessible and useful” to people.
3) Portal versus search — Yahoo’s already ceded “accessible and useful” search of “the world’s information” to Google, so they’ve decided to “connect” you with a hodgepodge of “passions”, “communities”, and “knowledge”.

So there you have it, folks. If you like a human-pushed portal, use Yahoo. If you like machine-pulled search, use Google.

I don’t like pushy humans. I, for one, welcome our new machine overlord.