Why Can't Microsoft Close The Deal?

TechCrunch has another Xobni rumor this morning. This one says that Xobni walked away from a deal to sell itself to Microsoft:

But the deeper that Xobni got into the discussions, the less comfortable it felt about its eventual fate inside the Microsoft machine. The fear was that Xobni would end up nothing more than a feature of Outlook. Microsoft wanted the entire team to move up to Redmond, and was vague in its answers about what it had planned for that team, or the product. In the end, the body language just wasn’t there.

This rings true to me because I've seen this happen before. Microsoft has trouble closing deals because when developers and entrepreneurs see their future inside of Microsoft, it often isn't pretty.

It goes to the bigger question of the Yahoo! fight. Henry Blodget says Microsoft is willing to up it's offer a couple bucks per share. But here's something to chew on. If this was Google trying to buy Yahoo! (an impossibility for anti-trust reasons), this deal would have been done a long time ago.

Microsoft messed with the technology industry for a decade and it's image in the industry has never really recovered. When Google talks about "do no evil", who do you think they were talking about?