August 30, 2007 | Thursday

Acer Acquires Gateway. Yahoo Acquires Search Partner?

By Jon Myers, Director Of Search  in News |Online Sales |Search Engines |Google |Yahoo

You may be wondering how the two points fit together. Acer computers announced plans to acquire Gateway for $710 million which will position them as the third largest computer vendor in the world. There has been a lot of talk in the press over the last few days about the deal and what it entails.

But it is interesting to step away from the actual deal and look at how this affects Search, Yahoo and Google. About 12 months ago we had a spate of these types of acquisitions where the search engines were keen to broker deals with computer manufacturers, this deal will form a multi-branded firm which ships 20 million PC’s a year.

So where does search fit into the overall mix here you may ask? Currently Acer is pre loading all of its PC’s with Yahoo tools such as default search page, toolbar, and one-click ’short-cuts’ to Yahoo web offerings.

Where on the Gateway side of things, they are a Google search partner with the same types of tools installed. As Acer is purchasing Gateway will they move all of the PC’s over to the Yahoo search deal or will they retain the Gateway brand and therefore honour the Google distribution deal?

Which ever search company Acer retains will ultimately benefit from the current distribution of over 20 million preloaded PC’s.

Comments

There are no comments for this entry yet. Use the form below to add yours.

Add your opinion

(will be encrypted, to protect against email harvesters)

SEM news and views blog articles

Subscribe to SEM news and views from Latitude

More feed subscribe options >>

Advanced Search

Browse by month
Browse by category