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Microsoft in Talks To Acquire Ebay
thatedeguy writes "The NY Post is reporting that Microsoft and Ebay are in talks for the online auction house to join the Microsoft family." That said, the talks aren't going that well at the moment. From the article: " Sources indicate that the talks, while still active, have cooled somewhat in the last two weeks as executives considered antitrust issues. It is unclear what the full impact of yesterday's advertising and search alliance between Yahoo! and eBay will be for talks between MSN and eBay. One source close to the matter suggested the Yahoo-eBay tie-up would not stop Microsoft from pursuing the online auctioneer."
I know you were kidding, but actually ebay's current market cap is $48 Bil. I would start the bidding there and put a BIN at $75 Bil. Only those with positive feedback should bid. Accept PayPal only. Good luck to the winner.
My comments show no sympathy for MS. If you think no company has wielded MS' influence then you've never heard of the Baby Bells, Big Blue, Tyco or SAIC.
Infiltrated dot Net
eBay is not an auction site, it's an auction-style site =)
... "Experience the thrill of placing the winning bid on an auction-style item"
An auction has a legal definition, which eBay doesn't meet - that is : goods have to be available for physical visual inspection for at least 24 hours prior to auction time.
Auctions were used to return or disperse recovered stolen property (or just stolen). Once offered at auction, stolen property is not automatically returned to its owner should it be proven stolen later, unlike other stolen property.
This is why eBay describes itself as : "eBay, the world's largest online marketplace!"
and
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
They run mostly Windows 2000.
If Microsoft and eBay are indeed talking, it is proof that Microsoft has way too much money just sitting around. Microsoft will ruin eBay if they were too aquire it. I don't want everything to be either Google this and MSN that.
Later,
-Slashdot Junky
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Landfill Mining Co.
Managing the (Un)natural Resources of Tomorrow
Microsoft has a program called SPLA (Software Provider License Agreement) that anybody who is a Microsoft Partner can join (becoming a Partner is basically filling out a form). There's a bunch of legal stuff you have to sign, but then you get access to their entire library, which you can then resell -- of course you're responsible for supporting it, but you pay MS (or one of their major contractors, like Software Spectrum) a fee per month for each piece of software you use. You can sell per-user 'subscriber access licenses' or per-CPU, unlimited-user licenses. The monthly fees you pay MS are pretety reasonable -- instead of buying SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition for $1500, you pay MS $3/mo/user and charge the client whatever you want. A lot of their commonly-used software is under $5/mo., and some of the more esoteric stuff is only a little more.
That fee includes free upgrades, so if I sell you a Windows license at $5/mo., you would automatically get Vista when it comes out. It's actually a very reasonable program, or at least it appears to be.
I recall when I used to visit eBay that a lot of the URLs had isapi.dll in them. After a while, I noticed that this had gone and there was a big 'Powered By Sun' logo on the front page. Now this has gone too.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
This is the New York Post we're talking about folks. Famous for its headline "HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR" and also for extorting money to kill negative stories about people. Don't place too much faith in the veracity of this story.
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
Actually, there aren't many E15k's most of the solaris boxes are 880's and 1280's. The only E15k's were in paypal, until paypal dumped them for big Hitachi sparc boxes. Also, don't forget that AFAIK all of the paypal front end servers run linux. Oh and some of the ebay frontend boxes are bening moved to solaris 10 running on opterons.
Google does not own a monopoly in any sphere. You must be ruled a monopoly to be a monopoly by a court of law. Google, from the last statistical results that I remember reading is that it holds some 40% of the market in searches and was near last in portal.
40% tops of anything is no where near a monopoly.
That's much different than 90% of the key technologies that drive the computer and information access.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
the most obvious is IE's dominance purely due to it's inclusion with Windows.
It wouldn't have anything to do with Netscape's browser sucking balls or Netscape trying its hand at the portal business at the wrong time or IE actually being BETTER at that time. You ignore alot of facts to supplement your own perceptions.
I do not see this with Google. First off, Google doesn't even have a 50% share of the global searches.
They have a little over 65% global. Your stats are for US.
You said a lot of things, but I'm I didn't get any actual critcism out of it.
That's because I didn't criticize. I merely pointed out that Google is well on its way to being the defacto search monopoly. I also gave parallels to what happened to Microsoft and what will happen to google.
There is no indication that they will ever be a monopoly
Its called a trend.
it is simply too easy to switch search engines.
It's simply too easy to buy an Apple or get a free Linux distro. The barrier to entry isn't the issue here, its the tendency of the user. The user doesn't want to switch search engines. Do you really think Joe enduser can tell bad search results from good? He is unmoitivated to switch.
As for Google offering the option to see other engine's results? They already do: it's called DogPile.
Google doesn't offer this, InfoSpace does. "They" is innappropriate here as it isn't Google doing it. Now, is there an option, yes. In the same way I have OS options, doesn't make MS any less of a Monopoly. Please don't try to blur the lines with semantics.
As I said, almost by definition, there will be no search monopoly because the cost of switching is almost zero to the end user.
And I said barrier to entry is not the defining point of monopoly, marketshare is. Googles trend since its launch has been increased market share every year. You assume the end user will know that there is a monopoly or will care. Thats alot of assuming to do. A monopoly in this case would be most relevant to the businesses involved with online components, not the end user.
Here's the thing, the end user you keep touting is Googles PRODUCT. Google uses search results to get the users and sell them to advertisers. You get a monopoly on that, there are serious issues that need to be discussed.
This is clearly not the case with Windows - many people dislike Windows, but they have so much invested in it that it makes it almost impossible to switch for non-geeks, and annoying even for the technically saavy.
This is only true of businesses, and that is quickly coming to an end with web standards used for integration.
The end user has less than $500 invested in Windows and plenty of options for Operating Systems. The problem is that they don't want to switch. They don't want to learn how to do something another way. That is a tendency of people, not any business practice.