The three letters Marc Andreessen can't bear to type
Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen, left bored by running a social-networking startup, has much time on his hands to write excellent analyses of the tech industry. His blog post on why Microsoft-Yahoo might fall apart seems prescient in the wake of that deal's failure. But there's one odd thing about his writeup. Read this passage:
Big mergers and acquisitions, particularly among public companies, particularly among public companies that have large shares of their respective markets, can take a year or more between the day the deal is signed and announced, to the day the deal is actually executed and closed. During that year plus, all kinds of things can happen that could cause the deal to fall apart.
Isn't Andreessen obviously thinking of AOL-Time Warner, a deal which faced intense opposition from competitors and regulatory scrutiny, and which Andreessen has called a "rolling catastrophe"? Come on, Marc, look on your keyboard. There's an "a" key on the left. An "o" on the right. And just below it, an "l." It can't be that hard to type.