Microsoft Acquires Jellyfish.com

Microsoft is very eager to make noise in the online marketing space.  With the recent acquisition of aQuantive and now Jellyfish, it seems that they'll stop at nothing to (over)pay for companies with a solid future.  The only problem lies in making their money back.  Jellyfish is on fire now since they are in the comparison shopping space and are offering a "Cost per Acquisition" (CPA)...

To my knowledge there are no patents; it's all about the business model. The acquisition price was probably relatively trivial for MSFT. Jellyfish was an "also ran" in online shopping with a vaguely unique consumer proposition. It's not explicitly a counter to the Google CPA effort, which remains small. MSFT could do CPA on its own network and doesn't need Jellyfish to implement it. My sense is that...

Microsoft gets serious about e-commerce with acquisition of Jellyfish, an innovative community-based shopping service that offers great deals to shoppers, and makes merchants happy, too.

•Microsoft's acquisition of Jelllyfish.com provides immediately credibility to the social shopping market. •Microsoft acquired Jellyfish.com for both offensive and defensive reasons. •Microsoft recognizes that today's product set might not always meet the needs of tomorrow's users and the acquisition provides additional technology to broaden its technology portfolio and diversify...

Chasing GOOG is pointless so MSFT is changing things up: wagering on shoring up intellectual property rights on hip, new consumer shopping models. MSFT needs to either compliment or compete with Yahoo. Jellyfish moves it in this direction. MSFT will need to overcome serious challenges to achieving full advertiser participation in an advertising model requiring significant back-office integration....