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Google Rebuffs Microsoft Takeover Bid
Chris Gondek writes "The Sydney Morning Herald has posted that Internet search leader Google has rejected a takeover bid from Microsoft in favour of selling its shares directly to the public. According to The New York Times (Login Required), Google wishes to sell only about $US2 billion worth of shares to the public."
There's a good piece up over on The Register that talks about how Google and Microsoft would make great partners.
"Max, come over here. French-Canadian bean soup. I want to pay. Let them leave me alone." - Dutch Schultz
Except I read that Google was valued at 9 billion which would sure eat into MS' reserves.
Here's the Guardian story.
-- Free software on every PC on every desk
To understand why, you have to understand how Google makes money, and remarkably few reports have pinpointed how. It's said to be in the 'search engine business' - but unless you take the term at its most literal, to encompass comparison shopping sites, or pay-to-play engines - there is no public search engine business.
Google is an advertising business. It's an intermediary between media buyers and sites who want to see some advertising revenue: it's simply an old-fashioned media agency. Some of the property, the 'billboards' if you like, in the sense of the word that ClearChannel understands it, Google owns and operates itself. Advertisements show up on the search results, in Usenet groups and of course on its prime 'content' advertising space at the moment, Blogger.com. Google's main rival is Overture, which was recently acquired by Yahoo!. In this business model, Google doesn't 'own' the properties but acts a broker in the classic sense.
Then can you explain why Microsoft opted to buy Hotmail instead of developing their own webmail system?
At the time of purchase Microsoft was looking for a search engine and free e-mail. Hotmail was way ahead in the free e-mail rivalry, and since MSFT was going into ISP business to fight AOL, a free e-mail system would boost both Web properties, name recognition and ISP portion of MSN. I think they figured marketing costs into acquiring that many users and figured it was worth it.
If Google was up for sale for 300-500 mil, my suspicion is that MSFT would be there in a jiffy to get a deal. When we're talking billions, you've got to take things into account, like what exactly are you paying for? Google has the largest index, 3.3B pages and good search technologies for Web, images, groups and whatnot. Can you replicate the huge index? Yeah, with some investment in the million-dollar range. Can you replicate the search technologies? More or less yes, with people you already have.
Or why Yahoo! and AOL are still kicking MSN's ass all over the place
Define "kicking ass". MSN was profitable as of last quarter. Yes, took a while to get there with gazillions of dollars spent, but it's in the black now. MSFT has to report to its shareholders on profitability, not market share. I personally use Yahoo! services and prefer them to MSN, but since I don't pay for Yahoo! Mail or Briefcase or Launch videos, I fail to see that MSN is losing money, except some ad revenue.
Other than that I agree with most of the things you've mentioned.
So they actually ARE now taking the risk of a hostile takeover. So long as they were privately held, there was no such risk.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Teoma does sometimes search better than Google, and so does, surprisingly, AltaVista, if you skip the advertising crap.
I could only find this patent belonging to Google. It does not describe PageRank specifically, maybe I was looking in the wrong place.
where to start ......
....
lets see
okay firstly Linux adoption is not regressing, as a matter of fact research shows it has only nominally slowed in the US.
Apache's popularity is not declining, and since you brought it up I want statistical proof of that claim, and dont point to netcraft, it is wildly inaccurate.
SCO's lawsuit has accomplished nothing, as a matter of fact if SCO loses (and it looks like they will according to lawyers) they will be helping linux and the GPL by eliminating this threat so early in their life span, and also by testing the GPL in court, thereby giving precidence.
PS2 faces stiff competition sure, but its still winning.
Oracle hasnt even been touched by MS, Oracle's only real competition is DB2, and in some markets mySQL. Microsoft doesnt make anything that even runs on 64 bit proc's yet(Or a REAL OS). let alone some of the more elite features of Oracle, that comment is laughable.
I'll grant you the IE comment. however microsoft has attempted the search engine thing before, and failed. miserably. every stinkin time.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
Do these search engines publish that many pages, or are they generated "on-the-fly" with perhaps a deal with Google?
For instance, I'm converting some of my DVDs to VCDs (so I can store the DVDs in case they break -- little fingers and all), and searched for "software make vcd windows". The first three links were from newfreeware.com, and appear to be pages of collections of software in their database. The second and third link are the same, just capitalized differently. They are (/. inserted spaces before last letter on 2nd and 3rd):
http://www.newfreeware.com/search.php3?q=make+vcdc dC D
http://audio.newfreeware.com/search.php3?q=make+v
http://audio.newfreeware.com/search.php3?q=make+V
Are the rest of you seeing similar things?
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
The Red Army did so much more in Europe than any other allied nation, including mine, but with so little recognition amongst most of the western world that comments like the above have become the norm in online discussion.
In the haste to get up on the "reds" during the cold war, a whole chapter of military history just got swept under the rug in American schools ( I assume you're an American ). It was the Russians that stormed Berlin, and it was the Russians that sacrificed something like 20 million troops and civilians, compared to United States military losses somewhere < 300,000. Even Chinas losses were an order of magnitude greater.
AC as this is way off topic.Doing "sometimes better" does not cut it. The local psychic network or a fortune cookie is "sometimes better" at predicting health issues than a doctor, but people tend to trust entities with the best average results.
They switched to Google for reasons other than name, they will only stick to it as long as those reasons are valid.
The name didn't keep Altavista "alive", even though it was THE engine for long time. It still works, and I do use it every once in a while (for very specific searches), but the fact is its brand name value has been quickly nullified.
Yahoo couldn't survive on brand name alone either, even though they have the advantage of being an Internet historical landmark of sorts. And yet, for most people I know these days, Yahoo as a brand is more of an email/newsgroups service than a search engine.
"Name alone" does not keep a company alive in the Internet. There is little or no customer loyalty, specially in something as competitive as the search engine service.
Google will be successful only as long as it is consistently better than its known competitors at what it does, and competitors become known very quickly... Whenever a new search engine becomes distinctly better than Google, it will take over. That's how Google took over in the first place.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
I think /. already has a good answer: a system of moderation. /. doesn't have "moderator ratings" so whenever someone gets mod points their mods are "equal" to everyone else's. But if Google allowed people to give feedback on the relevance of links, then the spam problem would (eventually) go away.
It could be as simple as adding radio buttons (like meta-mod) or a drop-down (like mod) next to each link. If it wasn't helpful to you, select that and click the "Go" button next to the link (or perhaps at the bottom of the page, but having one for each link sounds like a better UI). It could give a popup saying "Thanks for your feedback" with links to your user details, a graph showing feedback given for that page, etc.
And as people make their choices, it could aggregate them and people who are consistently going the other direction from the crowd would have a lowered feedback rating, so their feedback would have less effect than someone who was 100% in the crowd's direction.
I'd love to work on this. (I've applied to Google before, but never gotten an interview. At least now I have a job, it's been a long couple years.)
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.