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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."
Bidding for Ebay starts at $8 billion, but you can Buy It Now for $12.5 billion.
MS will spend YEARS trying to dump the *nix servers out of Ebay ;-)
In what way is that anything like with bundling IE/Media Player in Windows while having a "monopoly" position in the OS market ?
Does Google have a monopoly in ANY sphere ?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
The thing is, Microsoft always had a "Buy for product, not market share" mentality.
Almost all companies they bought have been startups with a really cool product ( Hilgreave, WebTV, Bungie...). As far as I know, Microsoft has never bought a Novell or a Lotus or a Compaq, they kill competition with hard work and/or unfair practices, but not with company acquisitions.
So when you see Microsoft thinking of buying eBay instead of developing an alternative and slowly increasing their market share( like they did with IE) you know they are very desparate and afraid of Google.