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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."
It's good to hear that the people running google have as much practical business sense about them as the people running the machines have technical sense. This is how things should be done - don't put your entire worth out there on the market for investors to decide, hold back and prove your company worth through your product.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Remains to be seen how real the takeover offer was in the first place. Microsoft has thousands of employees and 50 bil in the bank, which pretty much allows them to develop any search technology they want and hire the best people in the industry.
Even the purchases that Microsoft has made usually reflect either small companies with little capital and some interesting technologies (Connectix), or medium-size companies with tons of clients that Microsoft wants access to (Great Plains, Navision). Seeing Microsoft buy Google would also raise all sort of anti-trust concerns due to Google's dominance.
While among the Silicon Valley startups the popular way to get attention is to announce that Microsoft is interested in takeover. Strange to see Google succumb to this tactics of boosting the pre-IPO evaluation price, but perhaps I am wrong on that.
you know, google is the first thing on the internet (not just the web) that i think has actually changed my life is some way. i use google probably 30 to 40 times on a regular business day, searching for certain strings and letting it do the hard part for me. if i didnt have google, or anything exactly like it or better, i would be really grumpy for a very long time. if google ever sold out and became a crap factory, it'd be a dark day on the intarweb. fortunately i didnt get the vibe that's about to happen from the nyt article.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Eat that Microsoft! I'm not sure how long they can hold out, but I tire of every innovation being eaten up by Microsoft. For me, the frustration goes back to PowerPoint, a once fine program.
Google will be an immensely popular stock-selling only 2 billion in shares will create a gigantic demand, with a smaller supply, and thus I'm wondering if Google's going to just open up their shares for trade on an exchange like most companies do...
Something I certainly see as being possible is that Google could put up shares for sale in public auction. Think about it, why wouldn't they? It would make sense-the shares would be worth more because of the supply/demand aspect, and in addition, it would be dually serving eBay, which I believe Google has some ties to(as they do to most web companies).
In addition, Google could put up shares for charity--what a better opportunity for them to showcase themselves, and benefit some organization at the same time?
The most important thing to remember about Google's IPO is that they are worth quite a bit, and they may just sell their shares in a most unusual way.
Besides...it's Google!
I think we should rename Sundays on Slashdot Duplication Day.
This is the same story that was posted on Friday. I know that Sydney is on the other side of the International Date Line from New York, but this is a three-day old story!
But their announced ambitions to "reinvent" the IPO market, avoiding classical underwriting and directly auctioning their shares, really is too much. The comments are more than presumptuous and pretentious. They are sophomoric.
Isn't it enough to be the first company since 2000 to mount a successful IPO of an Internet-based business, with enormous multiplies applied to forward revenues, toward a $10 billion plus valuation? The idea that an Internet company, among all the companies out there, will fundamentally reinvent the way that public offerings of this magnitude are done in the U.S. is laughable.
As Google is run (and currently owned) by smart people, I think that the company's discussion of auctioning its shares is a way of making a lot of noise, and heightening speculation -- in the face of obvious interest by the Microsoft Corporation. It is intended to raise the issue of its valuation in a big, very public way, and enhance the prospects of a Microsoft acquisition at the highest possible cash amount.
It is certainly not intended to build good will on Wall Street. It's hilarious to think that the way to exert influence on Wall Street is to suggest ways to fundamentally undermine the revenue streams of the leading investment bank underwriters.
I couldn't find any references to the $150 million profit number regarding Google. Can you give some more details?
admittedly i have some strange ideas about our economic/social systems. i'm a fan of debian and spend time every day trying to figure out how to get rid of corporations as legal entities with no real personal liability.
caveats aside, i really think the US Gov should buy google. maybe i'm just a mindless stallman bot, but i regard the google service as a public good. in fact, if google were to go away tomorrow, i'd become immediately unemployable. i've heard the same thing from other techies, non-techies, and even anti-techies.
just the thought/hoax of microsoft buying google would ruin me, and i'd have to make good on my promise after hearing bush won the election and actually leave the country.
i've seen too often on slashdot similar "i can't live without google" commentary so i know i'm not alone.
i'm not here to tell you that the US Gov should entertain buying companies lightly, or that there isn't a good chance that they would ruin google on their own. as i understand it, google isn't really offering itself for sale anyway, buy why screw around? what i am saying is that google has bought itself alot of time with such a great service. however, it will eventually fall prey to abuse on the street if they go that route, or some other bad economic time.
i'm not the only person who was disappointed at redhat's decision to end-of-life their free products after only months (12? i'm sure some slashdotter will correct me). it was the motivator for me to convert hundreds of machines i supported from redhat to debian. i understand the decision by redhat, the _company_, to earn and maintain a profit. if they go away eventually sobeit. if we lose sun, no problem, it will happen anyway.
i'm not so cavalier about google. its a public good and we need to protect it.
thoughts?
Google now is in quite desperate situation: their PageRank's are undermined by link spammers and bloggers, Yahoo! and Microsoft are actively developing their own search technologies and buy other companies
Google also swallows its small competitors and thinks of personalizing searches, essentially giving RIP to its PageRank(tm) technology.
What keeps Google afloat nowadays is just its name.
The fact that it's survived along the sides of Amazon who's first profit was not until 1/2002 and E-bay who's a different beast altogether show that the companies that are doing 'the different' are the ones who are setting the pace and maintaining their own quo's without Wall street intervention.
If you recall Wall Street intervention is what built up the tech sector bubble and the same thing that ultimately burst that same bubble.
The fact that google has survived so long is why it's such a hot stock and a hot topic, they didn't need the advice or the help from the Wall Street guru's other than the fact that Wall Streets greed for the company is going to set the price higher than what it would have been. Which is genius from any shareholder viewpoint (supply demand and control). So essentially Google is writing their own history rather than letting the Wall Street vultures write their obituary. If that's not reinventing the IPO market then what is?
Let's keep in mind that patents are in place to keep lawyers employed and keep them litigating. -CatGrep
Yahoo! and Microsoft are actively developing their own search technologies and buy other companies
That doesn't say they'll come up with anything good. MS has been unable to so far.
What keeps Google afloat nowadays is just its name.
Why not point us all to an engine with better search results then?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Remember folks... the only reason people use Google is because it's not bastardized with corporate greed
Not me. I use Google because it's the most useful search engine I've found. Very good search results. Very good other features I use daily (e.g. Google Groups)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
its not hard for me to imagine such an organization.
-- self funded. advertising dollars in their current form could go a long way towards (or completely) paying for pipe and power
-- free expertise. the expertise to run the system already exists in the open source community.
-- free software. it already runs on linux so there aren't any licensing issues that i know of except for continued use of google's magic algorithm.
-- great engine for employing some people who should be employed. its not hard to imagine 1/4 to full time employees who are also maintaining the linux kernel, writing apache, maintaining postgres, or keeping the optimized network drivers smoking.
as an ancillary note, i've thought for awhile that the US Gov should perform some "directed welfare" whereby they offer some paltry salary to a group of (see list above... kernel/apache/etc.) whereby their salary would be rediculously low by even todays market standards, and the developers would be incredibly happy a. not to have to work for a traditional company and b. to be making _any_ money doing what they love.
the recent rampant failures of the power grid makes me wonder the same thing about a similar model being applied to that system. surely there are ReallySmartPeople who have the design/architectural expertise who aren't driven by money and are interested in working on the hard problems. i know a few people who are at the forefront of their industry. one in particular is a biomedical engineer who would keep working on the same problems whether they were in the context of running a business or being involved with a not for profit. i see the same thing in the open source community.
getting back to my earlier comments about getting rid of companies in their current form--- i'm just not convinced they are the best engine for continued technological advancement. especially in the code areas where the hard parts are so cheap.
and as i'm beginning to see in the development of the "World Intelligent Network" (as google is a very early form of) a company in the traditional sense isn't the best vehicle for that either.
Why not point us all to an engine with better search results then?
here you go
There are a lot of searches that work better on ATW then google these days. The most obvious to me is Autopr0n Autopr0n Now, I'm not just being narsisistic here, When I started AP google returned not a single result for "autopr0n". Now there are thousands. Google's first result is my slashdot info, it's second Is my live journal, then my k5 info. All of those sites link to Autopr0n.com. After the main link, Alltheweb links to a lot of sites that link to me, just like google did for several months. Now google returns a seeming random sites that either link to me or mention me. It used to be bogs and people actually talking about my site.
I guess a page with a bunch of pr0n links == "crap" to them, but it's still annoying. I'm not trying to google bomb them, and in the first month I got lots of hits from people searching google for "autopr0n". Pretty stupid, but still. I've also noticed bad results for a lot of technical queries lately. If I could remember any, I might have been able to come up with a better post. A month or so ago a search for "make file syntax" would return a message board post asking about it, while ATW would return the make file manual. They seem to have fixed that, though.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I want to be clear on what you're asking for here. You actually desire a situation where you send the government a list of things you happen to be interested in on any particular day?
well , lets say microsoft bought google. 1.Google will be shipped only with Microsoft products.google updates would suck. 2.This will anger open source guys and in turn they would work on a project Freesearchengine. 3.MS will make changes to google glorifying his products and lessening the quality of search 4.Eventually Opensource community will win bringing a better search enginethan google.[google-MS additions] So this is just a passing phase for us !! Lets wish google remain a king as it is !!! Cheers
Hello , this is my way.
Which way is yours ?
btw there is no right way
Don't forget that Google also sells technology. In fact, that business is growing for them.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Do you know what a hostile takeover is? It's when one company buys greater than 50% of a another company against the board of director's will. Google here is only selling about 10% of itself. So, control of it will still be in private hands. So, they actually ARE NOT taking the risk of a hostile takeover.
Seems like Google is themselves using a "distributed effort" (just that it's distributed only among their machines, and most likely with far less latency than an @Home arrangement would have). I bet, though, that given sufficient interest (an angel VC perhaps?) a good product could be made. One with moderation/meta-moderation and rankings of moderators so that chaos mods would dwindle to less than ambient noise, and excellent mods would be "louder" in the system.
Still, beating Google's response time with a distributed effort would be very difficult indeed.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Who cares about the goodwill of investment bank underwriters? Their goodwill and fifty cents won't buy you a cup of coffee in Starbuck's, in Google's position.
If you don't need a huge chunk of cash now, then who cares what the bankers think? Especially if, like Google, your stock is going to be in high demand however you release it? You're not doing this to play on the Street. You're doing it since you've spread your stock around so much that you'll have to start reporting financials anyway, and so your employees will now have an actual value for that stock you gave them.
It's especially nice since you want to retain control. One type of Dutch auction is the perfect way to spread the shares around -- the form that charges only the lowest winning per-share bid price to the winners, but doles out the shares to highest bidders first. The result is small investors who definitely want a few shares will bid insanely high prices, in the almost-certain knowledge that the institutional bidders that will ultimately make up most of the winners won't bid nearly that much.
So, maybe you don't make as much cash with the offering as you would have through a traditional venue. BFD. You brought in some money in a way that only adds obligations you already were going to wind up with, you made your employees' stock worth something, and you did your best to immunize yourself from Wall Street. What's not to love, and who cares what the Street thinks of you in the morning?
Best bit would be if Google goes with doing its own share offering, then uses the software to provide similar services to other companies.
:-)
Hey presto, Google now takes business from Saloman, JP Morgan, CSFB etc. Now _that_ would be an interesting market development. I've always thought that the IPO business was a bit archaic.
So there's my prediction: Google uses its own IPO as a way of developing / testing share offering software to allow it to enter the market and compete with the big investment banks.
Not really off topic after there's a little sub thread going on it!
For the record the Russians lost something on the order of 34,000,000 in WWII. This was largely due to two major issues with the Red Army.
1.) Stalin genuinely belived the Malatov-Ribintropp pact which divided Poland between the two countries. It took Stalin several days (weeks? Sources are unclear on this) to react to the news that Germany had invaded. This, in conjunction with his general paranoia and consistant purging of the Red Army's higherups lead to confusion and disarray in the face of the enemy.
2.) Once the Red Army rallied, Stalin realized he had a lot more men than he had weapons for them to fight with. Thus began a classic Soviet military strategy. When faced with an enemy better equiped than you, trade men for technology. In the case of WWII Stalin sent around five times as many soldiers into battle than he did guns. The result was that a lot of young men died without a weapon to fight with. The idea was that once soldier A had been shot, solider B would take up his gun and keep going. For a good example of how this worked see Enemy At the Gates.
While it is unfair to say that we Yanks saved the collective asses of Europe in WWII militarily, it's not unfair to say we did it economicaly. Roosevelt (against US popular opinion, and in a deal that would have gotten him impeached today) supplied weapons to the UK, the French Resistance, Russia, and a few others at cost or at a loss in many cases. The US economy was fighting in the European theater well before December 7, 1941.
That said, yes... the UK had turned the tide in the Battle of Britian, and while I'm not completely sold that Montgomery had Rommel under wraps in Africa before Paton showed up, he was making progress. The Soviets were doing an excelent job on the Eastern Front of the war and things were definately looking up for "All That Is Just and Good In The World" (tm) before the Yanks stepped in.
That said, history is the study of what happened, not what might have happened. There's no way of knowing what the effect of Hitler's new "superweapons" (the V1, the Hydrogen powered Uboat, and the Mesherschmidt 271[the jet... can't remember the number]) would have been had the US not stepped into shorten the war. Had those weapons ever entered full production things may have broken differently in the European theater. There's just no way to tell.
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
Google has just as much of a problem as Microsoft does: it's centralized. The message of the Net -- to me -- is that decentralization is how we have to move. Relying on a search engine run by a single organization -- which can be silenced by governments or corporations -- is a bad idea generally. I love Google, but the sooner we can move away from the centralized model, the better.
(Note that Google is on the record as believing that peer-to-peer search engines solve the wrong problem, but I think they're ignoring the legitimate concerns about centralization that P2P solves.)