As everyone waits to find out how new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz plans to resuscitate the struggling Internet giant, in the meantime, the stress of watching Yahoo bungle one thing after another — such as coming within inches of a merger with Microsoft, only to blow the deal at the 11th hour — seems to have taken its toll on some otherwise perceptive stock analysts. Take Gene Munster from Piper Jaffray, for example. As described by Barron’s blogger Eric Savitz, Munster recently wrote yet another “open letter” to Bartz (man, she must be getting sick of those) in which he suggested that Yahoo buy the New York Times. And maybe Gawker Media as well. Oh yes, and Twitter too. And maybe FriendFeed. And maybe some other stuff.
Is this a strategy, or a laundry list? With all due respect to Munster, rattling off a bunch of names as possible acquisitions doesn’t amount to a realistic strategy for the company at this point. I get the idea — Yahoo needs quality content, and the NYT has that in spades; Yahoo needs to get bloggy, and Gawker owns that territory in numerous key market niches; and Yahoo needs to get more social, hence Twitter and FriendFeed. But isn’t this just going to spread Yahoo’s peanut butter even thinner? It’s already gotten so thin that even peanut-butter manifesto writer Brad Garlinghouse is gone. More importantly, gobbling up Twitter or the New York Times doesn’t actually make a whole heck of a lot of sense.
(read the rest of this post at GigaOm)