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Microsoft to Buy DoubleClick?
roscoetoon writes to tell us Bloomberg is reporting that Microsoft is in talks to buy DoubleClick. Seen as a move to compete against the Google advertising engine Double Click owners Hellman & Friedman are seeking a $2 billion payday. "The purchase would give Microsoft tools to battle Google Inc. for ads that appear on Web sites. DoubleClick works with advertisers to create online campaigns, such as streaming video clips to promote New Line Cinema's movie "The Number 23." The New York-based company's Dart technology monitors the performance of Internet ads for marketing companies."
Will it be as repressive as google? Read their terms of service. There is a whole list of things you cant discuss on an adsence page. Guns and drugs to name two.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Perhaps the next IE update will add a new 'feature' to detect if ads are blocked/domains are localhosted and deny access to the webpage?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
This statement (about change of ownership not affecting accessibility) is clearly wrong for those people who use Windows. I am predicting a networking patch through WindowsUpdate soon after the deal is completed which, among other effects, suddenly makes the computer fail to acknowledge your "127.0.0.1 www.doubleclick.com" entry in hosts.
I can assure you, the best way to get rid of dragons is to have one of your own.
That is what I meant. If MS owns both the browser and the server, it could track whether pages visited also hit the real doubleclick servers and take 'appropriate' action. IE 7 already has 'Phishing' filter technology which sends your URL to a central server. Combine that technology with the doubleclick server and viola...
To back up all the way to the beginning, a couple of years ago, I got a call from a recruiter about a job with a small local company that was writing some software that would allow people to track advertising campaigns. I interviewed, and felt rather ambivalent about them... they seemed like they were writing decent software, but I'm over the whole startup thing, and spending 80 hours in the office. They passed on me. At the time I was a little upset, even though I wasn't all that interested in them. As my neighbor put it, "It's like when the ugly girl doesn't want to dance with you."
A while later, I saw some of the guys who interviewed me walking around the building I worked in. I checked the building directory, but the company wasn't on the list. So I hit their website, and lo and behold, they'd been bought by Doubleclick.
Whew. Dodged a bullet. I mean, Doubleclick. Yikes. I'm past the point in my life where I can walk out of a job on principle without another job already lined up, and I'm still paranoid from the bust.
So I tell the recruiter all this, and I don't really mince words about my opinion concerning Doubleclick.
He submitted me anyway.
I got a call a couple days later from someone. It was outside normal business hours, and I normally don't answer numbers I don't recognize during my off time, but a good friend of mine was expecting the birth of his son any day, so I answered just in case. I was in a guitar shop at the time, and couldn't hear too well, but they were talking about the opportunity at Doubleclick. I assumed it was another recruiter, so I went into my whole spiel about my history with the other company, how glad I wasn't working for them when they were acquired, and how distasteful I found Doubleclick.
I guess there's really no suspense here. Naturally, the guy I was talking to was the hiring manager over at Doubleclick, and I had just unloaded on him. In fact, I do believe I mentioned being "glad I don't have that stain on my resume."
I felt pretty horrible. It was an accident, and I'm sure the poor guy didn't want to work at Doubleclick any more than I did. But still... in retrospect, it was pretty funny.
Even funnier was the fact that Doubleclick had an office in our building. When I told a coworker the story the following day, she pointed out that, undoubtedly, someone on the second floor was telling the exact same story :)
lol I blocked Doubleclick at home and on everyone of my client sites ever since they came out...
The only thing that concerns me is as someone else has said, they start rotating the hosts or even outright dropping "doubleclick" anywhere in the domain name so those filters no longer work.
If the ads suddenly start coming from Microsoft.com servers suddenly trying to block them would cause issues getting updates and patches.
I can see it now, the new Eula and Verification tool, in order to access MS Updates you must all access to our advertising service.
Opps we see your system blocks Microsoft Advertisement, sending a message with your information to our legal department, contact your administrator to unblock our messages in order to receive your free critical updates.
And then I'm sure that MS will try to sue people for blocking their advertisements just like they try to sue you for getting a computer without their software...
" they killed Netscape-the-company completely by, despite the many myths, simply being better than Netscape v4"
/.
no, the FACT of the matters is, they beat them by leveraging there vast fortune to give away, and later include IE into the OS. IE was no better the Netscape.
This is not a myth, there was some sort of court case about it. It might have been mentioned on
Of course, MS bought Hotmail, and with that purchase, all smart innovation with Hotmail came to a halt.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Tell me what exactly Doubleclick does that is offensive to you?
Three words: Punch. The. Monkey.
When Google carries a flash ad campaign that obnoxious, I'll block them too.
I know some folks that work at DoubleClick. The difference between it and YouTube is that DoubleClick actually makes money. I'm not sure it's worth $2 billion, but it's definitely profitable.
Considering the balls-up made when Yahoo bought Overture, I'm really suprised Microsoft are trying this. This is a bad, stupid idea.
Training monkeys for world domination since 1439