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Microsoft And Time Warner Resume Talks
An anonymous reader writes: "Seems as though Microsoft and Time Warner have come back together at the negotiating table." From the article: "The two companies are focused on combining AOL's Web content with Microsoft's search-engine technology, although other aspects of the talks are sketchy. It isn't clear whether they are considering merging their Internet dial-up businesses, which generate lots of cash, the paper said. The two companies originally began discussions about some sort of Internet deal earlier this year. But the talks stalled in the late summer over a range of issues including technical obstacles and questions about control."
Where is the Federal Trade Commission when you need them? Seriously, as much as I don't like government messing in the affairs of business, it's times like this where it could be justified.
Well, if they do merge, I just hope the new company is called HyperCompuGlobalMegaNet.
>>The two companies are focused on combining AOL's Web content with Microsoft's search-engine technology
Okay, there are two unknowns here. Can somebody tell me what is AOL's web content, and which is Microsoft's search engine technology?
The two companies are focused on combining AOL's Web content with Microsoft's search-engine technology... Anything that makes it harder to find "AOL's Web content" is fine by me.
I know, I know, trolling and all that -- feel free to mod me into oblivion. But I can't really think of any two companies who are more evil than those two (although a few come to mind which are equally so). If MS and AOL combine, could it even get any more evil than that? Unless..!
Working in a DevOps shop is like playing in a band made up entirely of keytarists.
AOL provides 40% of google's click revenue, if they start using MS then Yahoo becomes number 1, MS becomes a player, and google loses almost half of its revenue stream all in one clean swoop.
Neither of them are terribly huge in the search market. Google is the clear winner there. So, let's say they do merge, they jump from 12% market share to... 12% market share?
The paranoid might see this as some sort of threat, I suppose. Perhaps you should look to Google if you want to fuel the flames of your paranoia. They have a pretty aggressive strategy for, well, just about everything. Multimedia, search, searching multimedia, desktop search, hell, I heard they're even coming out with BrainSearch so you can remember who that was you slept with last night.
As for the dialup market... it's dying off. And with so many locales having serious talks of wireless-for-everyone -- why, one taste of the difference between wireless and dialup will sell just about anyone.
Anyone that thinks this is a big deal as far as some monster being created is probably either distributing FUD, or open to buying it.
My ZooLoo
Let's face it, Time Warner's strengths are in content (magazines, movies, books) while Microsoft's strengths are in technology (to put it politely). The one thing Google does not have is exclusive content. Imagine if MSN and AOL began delivering exclusive Time Warner branded content -- could be enough to attract a lot of people.
Just a thought.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
So they started talking again. woo. *balloons* *confetti* bleh.
My prediction. If anything comes out of this, it will be Microsoft supporting both formats.
...there will be only one company. MergeCo.
It sell everything from software to pornography to heating oil, and will immediately either purchase or simply firebomb any competitor out of existence.
People will call this system a "free market".
And all will be well with the world.
NOTICE: This notice will appear at the bottom of all my slashdot posts.
One would assume that companies with as much know how (They must know something) as these two would realize that revenue from dial-up is going to continue to shrink and eventually die. There's no long term benefit to focusing on a dial-up service.
It just boggles my mind that a service that has been made obsolete (except in rural areas, but that will happen eventually too) is still focused on by such large companies. You'd think at least AOL would have learned from their mistakes and switched their focus entirely by now.
"If you put butter and salt on it, it tastes like salty butter." -Terry Pratchet, on Popcorn.
What would Lawrence "Larry the liquidator" Garfield say about this.
"I bet 10 years ago there were dozens of dial-up companies...5 years from now there will only be one
and I bet you it will be the best damn dial up company you ever saw...but would you want to be a shareholder in that company?"
This is not an aquisition to create a new internet behemoth, this is cannibalism. This is microsoft eating AOL getting its list of technophobes and little old grannies. Its Time Warner dumping AOL for as much money as it can get. The only worrysome part is Microsoft getting control of Netscape. I suspect we can get the feds to force Microsoft to sell off Netscapes trademarks and assets as a condition of sale and that SHOULD be Mozillas stand on the issue.
M$ might be wanting to get all that targeted ad revenue and search bums on seats but that isn't what Time Warner is offering. Time Warner (IMO) is looking to dump AOL with extreme predjudice, this means washing their hands forever, finito. The article talks about merging MSN&AOL and spinning them off as a merged company - but M$ can't do that because MSN is core to their strategy to 'KILL google'.
m e-mr-aol customer is dead - that market is over, grandmama has got herself a blog. I digressed there but my point was microsofts stock has been performing shit-to-flat since 2000 and is poised for a little rise this next 12 months with various new products. The only reason to absorb AOL would be if they were afraid of the big institutions dumping at the first hit of an upturn. M$FT recently has been a lame stock, propped up by buy-backs and crappy (throw me africkin bone) dvidends - the halcyon days are over see the mini-blog. Why would balmer exasberate this downward trend?
Any company that just buys and absorbs AOL is going to take a stock hit. The market knows AOL is piece of shit, with dial-up customers abandoning it, no penetration in broadband (locked out in effect by telecoms and cable gatekeepers), the naive new-to-the-information-super-highway-please-rape-
Even M$N employees have said MSN is at best a bit of fun. A place where cash is burned on shiny projects just to stay relevent and keep a presense. Microsofts heart just isn't in the internet at all, that might change so they keep an oar in.
Microsoft could take 30% of googles ad revenue and M$FT stock wouldn't budge. M$ is just too bloody big, it would be a penny in the ocean of cash. But googles stock would probably be in some trouble. M$ would just be hurting google for the sake of hurting something. Possible even typical (but would the share-holding sheep go along in 2005 when its their dividend being sqandered on balmers he-man [really you need to see the current mini-blog] ego-trip board games)
MSN messenger and AIM already link up anyway.
You can mix pig-shit and horse-shit anyway you want - but you'll never make a tasty treat.
'Be the change you want to see in the world' - Al Gore
Why all this talk of merger scares? A joint venture is one thing, but these companies will simply not merge. You think Billy has any intention of giving up ownership or control of Microsoft? Ted might have got into bed with Steve Case, but I think a Ménage à trois is pushing things a bit too far.
Plus, who who would be on top? I don't think Bill would enjoy biting the pillow.
"If you put butter and salt on it, it tastes like salty butter." -Terry Pratchet, on Popcorn.
Together they can filter the DNS addresses of a good share of Internet traffic, like both have done already. Here's slashdotters recognizing that TimeWarner did so against www.inforwars.com and against www.prisonplanet.tv:
o ld=-1&commentsort=1&tid=95&mode=thread&pid=1372760 2#13727627
... the point is, the end-result is at least the danger of DNS address filtering no matter how you slice it. Alternatives to mainstream reporting gets squashed by such moves.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=164421&thresh
Alright, supposing for the sake of argument that the Level 3 filtering is just a rivalry between two ISPs
As to regulation, a legitimate purpose of government is to prevent such abuse by corporate entities (which have legal rights as "persons" under the law, yet have far greater freedom at the public's expense to acquire wealth than do either you or I). Of course, the fact that government has not done so in the past and has allowed the increase of such abuse means that government will probably not do so in this case.
As usual, we cannot depend upon government to protect us even though it should. So, it becomes important to get the word out to so people to stop subsidizing such abuse by dropping both Microsoft's and Time Warner. For those left without alternatives, isn't that an argument in and of itself to prevent monopolization by these giants?
They can raise the software and heating oil prices.
If they touch my Sunny Leone vids, it's gonna be war.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Seems kind of ironic that this is only about AOL, etc., especially when MS seems to be losing the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray war.
Microsoft has just released their much anticipated hands-free cordless mouse. Warning, it may hurt a little at first.
resume talks? I didn't even know they were hiring ;)
Offtopic hardly, off-language maybe.
Oh my goodness! He's stolen some AOL source code!
Or is it a transcript of the meeting?
To prevent this day from getting worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD TH
"technical obstacles and questions about control."
Those are never problems for Microsoft...
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
According to Alta Vista Babelfish it translates the subject from German to English as: "And how be enough gibt's for Dialup still?"
The comment itself translates to: "At present Dialup is probably still for sale, but in 3-4 years hardly still someone will probably pay for it, and within the Broadband range will have both MSN and AOL will oversleep. That can become thus probably only so a kind club of the dead Provider."
IANAC but if you combine shit with shit, don't you get shit?
Hungover Hank
If you think the bigwigs at AOL can't see the numbers of there dial-up customers dwindling your crazy. I'm sure they have teams of people working on sale projections and I can only imagine the numbers are only going to keep getting worse for dial-up. I see AOL trying to built a presence in the voip market. It only makes sence. There in a position to offer services I believe a lot of voip providers will have trouble competing with. Just my two cents.
Who cares about Netscape? All it is now is a web portal and a brand name nobody really cares about. The Mozilla Foundation develops mozilla and firefox independantly of AOL.
---------- Open Source is capitalism applied to IP.
Doesn't this article remind you of the book Jennifer Government?
Beep. Boop. Beep. You have questions. I have answers and your home address.
This is no suprise. Microsoft needs to try to become a great force in search to keep up with Google and AOL is content and no power anymore. Anyone at search.msn.com would be salivating over this kind of a deal so that the search services could be enhanced.
a 11372 shows that there is along way yet before search is over, the domination by Google is only for a short time if they only were to protect their lead but would be much more exciting if content were in the engine as well as the link to the result.
One great article by Microsofts Scoble http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/10/04.html#
Just like how he did it for Windows back in 86?
OK, call me paranoid if you want, and this will either be modded troll or never noticed, but here goes.
The one thing Tim Warner has the would really benefit Microsoft is its cable franchises. This would be a big lever to impose Microsoft tech in the entertainment field - Windows Media formats and MS DRM.
If Microsoft took over your cable modem services, that would be the real nightmare scenario. One way or another, subtle or overt, they would require using Windows as a condition of internet access. And the latest version too. Sometime after that they'd demand some sort of remote control.
They might allow Macs for a while as a token "alternative" OS, but never Linux. This would force Linux users back to dialup in large sectors of the USA.
There would be only weak regulatory opposition to this in todays political climate.
I think something else you have guys have not considered is that by joining forces specifically if what I am reading is that Aol and MSN combine their forces including search and portal as well as ad sales staff actually makes a lot of sense. Both companies right now specifically TWX is not seeing the stock market give them the neccessary valution for their online biz compared against the pure players such as yhoo and goog. So by combining forces and spitting out the biz to the public market, there would be a chance that the market would assign this new entity with the same mulitiple as yhoo or goog.
Secondly, as for the revenue loss for goog. Well this is a big deal no matter what anyone says. Aol like it or not is still being used as a search engine and i find it hard to believe that consumers who are currently using AOl will switch if the underlying technology now becomes msn (although they might if the relevancy decreases).
As for the dial-up biz. Yes it is dying no doubt about that, but right now still generates a ton of free cash flow. So why give that up for? What Aol is doing is using the money that they are getting from the dial-up to fund their other ventures primarly there new strategy of being supported by advertising similar to Yahoo. Whether or not it works or not, it does not make sense to just shut down a biz that generates tons of cash. In fact if this new entity is spit out to the public market, the combination aol/msn would have a stable but declining cash flow from their dial-up biz to fund any new venture they need until they can be completly ad-supported.
lastly, although the first time that aol/twx tried the merger to combine the synergy of content and distribution was a complete failure, this time is going to be differetn. Back then you guys have to remeber that there was alot of animosity between the two groups specifically the content guys (twx) compeletly hating steve case and his crew. Gerald Levin was a pussy. So with this nothing was done. Everyone was fighting like cats and dogs and it was a mess. This time it is different. TWX has a powerful and well liked CEO Parsons who has been able to elminate the internal fighting. Secondly, most of the old AOL guys are gone. thirdly, twx as a whole understands the need for online as evident by the valuation that yahoo and goog is recieiving for their company as well as seeing what their competitors are doing (news corp buying myspace and IGN, etc.) So bottom line I really think this new entity is going to be very powerful if they are actulally able to get the content.
and yes people like you and me never go to aol for content, but we are the exception.
He'll use Chair Power to coerce people to do it.
Most Window users are more of alternate operating systems such as Linux than they are of alternatives to Norton's antivirus. So many computers come with Norton's that the vast majority have never used anything else and aren't aware of alternative AV programs, such as AVG, Avast, NOD32, etc. The only other antivirus software I've seen being sold at Wal-Mart (the biggest store chain in the US) is McAffee's.
Seems to me that Symantec has more of a monopoly on AV applications than Microsoft does on operating systems - Microsoft could easily turn around and sue them for the exact same reason. Isn't that what Symantec is doing, trying to keep their near-monopoly on the AV market?
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.