It seems like today is the day of alliance announcements. Its been a month since the first message about Ebay looking for a partnership with Microsoft or Yahoo. Today Ebay announced its joint venture with Yahoo, you can read more details in a BusinessWeek Basically Yahoo will be image provider for Ebay and will promote PayPal for its merchants. At the same time Wall Street Journal publishes an article (subscription required) about Dell and Google collaboration. Talks about Dell and Google collaborating are already couple of months old though check out this post for example.
As usually I have my opinion about what is happening. I think the alliance of Yahoo and Ebay is a proper move. They nicely complement each other and their competencies do provide synergies. Especially taking into account that Yahoo has auctions too, but it is slowly dying. At the same time I don’t think that this alliance will help them to stand against Google as Ebay is hoping. I just don’t see how.
Now about Google and Dell, I am biased here and I don’t like it. The reason for my bias is that I don’t like Dell. I think they have great marketing, but their client retention ability and poor designed products are well known in blogosphere (I own one of their laptops, and I would fire everybody who works at customer service over there). That’s I disapprove of the fact of mere association with Dell. I think recently Google is trying to grow every way possible and as a result it slowly starts to diverge from its core values. The alliance with Dell is another little signal. If you recall Google complained that Microsoft is embedding MSN as default search engine. I think it is pretty hypocritical to sue somebody while you are doing the same thing. That is why I think it is an early signal of Google diverging from its roots of being authentic company. I am already not talking about Goolge embedding its services into Firefox,click-fraud lawsuit and unwilligness to provide feds with search data. I hope Google will not become just another “corporate America company” – that talks a lot, but is driven only by P/E statements.

Technorati Tags:Google, Yahoo, Dell, Ebay, Joint Venture