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."

Comments

Too bad:

[Momomoto]

There's a good piece up over on The Register that talks about how Google and Microsoft would make great partners.

Re:It's questionable

[donnz]

Except I read that Google was valued at 9 billion which would sure eat into MS' reserves.

Here's the Guardian story.

Re:Google rebuffing M$ is only HALF the story....

[diersing]

From our friends at The Register I've pasted this from the following article.

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.

Re:Good

[Bodrius]

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.