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Microsoft Looks To Refuel Talks With Yahoo
froggero1 writes "The New York Post is reporting that Microsoft wants to rekindle the takeover talks with Yahoo. According to the article, Yahoo! has repeatability turned away their offers, but Microsoft hopes that a lucrative 50 billion dollar offer will bring them back to the table. This move would increase Microsoft's web search market share to roughly 38%."
Because if you try at something several times and fail every time, just buy a successful one.
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
Surely such a move would be too easy for companies like Google and Ask.com to block via. anti-trust laws? Neither Microsoft nor Yahoo! can really be expecting Google to sit by and say "Oh, that's nice." to such a move, do they?
... I repeatability wonder why the grammar is so poor in Slashdot articles.
The NY Post says that John Kerry will pick Dick Gephart as his running mate.
According to the article:
As it stands now, a deal between Microsoft and Yahoo! would up the combined companies' share of the all-important search advertising market to 27 percent against Google's 65 percent.
I figure that it would be around 30% either way and falling.
You assume that people will stick with Yahoo! after M$ takes it over.
Facts are also in question. Where does it say MS is offering $50 billion?
From the FA:
The new approach follows an offer Microsoft made to acquire Yahoo! a few months ago, sources said. But Yahoo! spurned the advances of the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant. Wall Street sources put a roughly $50 billion price tag on Yahoo!.
OK, so presumably a large chunk of the $50bn will be in paper, not cash, but this is a good answer to those who say that Microsoft's $50bn in cash guarantees that they will be around for a long time.
A handful of deals like this, and the money will be gone. Then it's back to actually doing good business, something Microsoft seems awfully bad at these last years.
If Microsoft do buy Yahoo, it screams "duopoly", but in the long term they will ruin Yahoo's business, and leave the market entirely to Google.
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Maybe if Microsoft didn't keep trying to dominate every market they see someone else being successful at, they'd be able to do better in the ones that they've been successful at. Such as, I don't know, operating systems? Everything I've heard about Vista is bad; if MS had been focusing on making Vista better (and maybe on time) instead of trying to match everyone else it wouldn't have been such a, well, failure. The attempts to get into said other markets haven't really been a success, either. (Zune, anyone?)
Microsoft needs to let Yahoo alone and realize that it's not possible to do everything.
then 100% = $132B
So why does Google have a market cap of $146 billion? That's more than 100% of the market value. Some numbers must be wrong here... likely Microsoft's offer is too shallow. Or is Google over valued?
www.jmagar.com
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... cause then Microsloth would be one step closer to wiping out web standards and all the good work Yahoo! has put into the web development community.
Buy your way to the top!
No greater an illusion.
Like buying your search ranking or myspace friends.
If at first you don't succeed, try try to buy out your closest competitor.
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
Yahoo isn't for sale. Microsoft wants Yahoo and is waving huge dump trucks full of money around in front of Yahoo HQ.
And I don't think most of Yahoo's sites have been trending downwards, the exception being their search engine, of course.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
Any serious offer on the table and the parties need to sit down and have a chat. to do otherwise would be ignoring your duties.
On one side I don't see this being more than a chat to work out a deal- to buy Yahoo would cost MS all of their cash reserves, and then there is the little problem of moving their technology base from *unix to Windows would be a multiyear screw up, er, project (how long did it take MS to move Hotmail over to Windows?).
On the other side- MS does need to move against Google in some meaningful manner- Google's judo flip and really put MS off balance in a way that will play out for years to come- and I doubt MS shareholders are happy with the flat stock price for the last 7 years.
I suggest a large bowl of popcorn while we wait this one out, with extra butter.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
This is the company that used all sorts of illegal techniques to crush competition in the desktop OS, browser, and media player markets. Microsoft's CEO likes to use the phrase "integrated innovation" to tout the advantages of their offerings vis a vis the competition. In other words, they don't play well with anyone else.
Now they want to use a portion of their accumulated monopoly profits to acquire a company that has huge on-line communities and brand names. Anyone who's paid attention over the last 15-20 years knows what will come next: "best" access will soon be restricted to those who use Microsoft's operating system, browser, media players, and development tools. Eventually those using other browsers and operating systems may be shut out altogether. The average person buys Windows preinstalled on their Dell or Gateway won't care, but they don't see how innovation is being shut down the same way innovation in the PC desktop software market fell dramatically after Microsoft established its hegemony with Windows 95.
Microsoft has all the money and resources in the world. Let's see them build their own online communities, really innovate instead of talking about innovation.
As are most "brands" are overvalued relative to their market share...
However, value is not generally directly proportional to market share. There's lots of value associated with growth potential and being number 1 in a market...
Then again, there's always a limit to how many tulips people want...
You're reading it with the wrong accent
"fifty Beeeeeeellion dollars"
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This seems like a profoundly bad idea for all concerned. I like Yahoo. I don't use them for search, but they seem, at least marginally, to "get it": they've purchased a number of promising web startups like Flickr and Upcoming, and seem to mostly let them do their own thing (contrasted with that other web company). They allow their developers to be pretty transparent. They've created the Yahoo User Interface Library (which is quite helpful), etc...
.NET now."
If Microsoft were running the show, I'm worried that would change. Plus, I think there would be other problems. For Microsoft, what would be the easiest and quickest way for them to completely demoralize the employees who work in their Internet divisions? Buy Yahoo. For Yahoo, what would be the easiest and quickest way to confuse and worry their employees? Sell to Microsoft (although many might not be that confused while they're swimming in their huge piles of money.)
Finally, I'm concerned about Yahoo's services, were Microsoft to purchase them. It sounds like Microsoft has a large number of middle managers and policy makers who like nothing more than to assert their authority with arbitrary decisions. Yahoo seems to value a fair amount of development and language agnosticism (with sites written in PHP, custom languages, etc...) What happens to these sites when Microsoft comes in? "I'm sorry - we're rebuilding that in
I don't know - my responses aren't typically those of the knee-jerk Slashdot mentality, but this makes me even me wince.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
Wow, they must really be worried at Microsoft.
This is no less then an admission that their own search and online advertising strategy has failed completelly. They may disagree, but coin like that being offered for yahoo speaks volumes.
MSN was, at first inception, meant to be *the* portal to the internet. That failed so fast most people don't even know it. The new Microsoft search site? Know anyone that uses it? cos I don't, and I know a lot of computer users, ranging from expert to pebmak's. Not one Microsoft web strategy has succeeded. Ok, ok, people use Hotmail, and people use msn messenger. Alas that's not much of a money maker for Microsoft, not without the original ill conceived all encompassing Microsoft Network.
So, they now know that without buying out another major search company they can't compete in search or net advertising. The problem there is that they have no assurance that the purchase will help them at all?
First, they can't drop the Yahoo! name, or people simply won't use the product. Secondly, adding it to their monolithic corporation will most likely result in innovation at yahoo (is there any? I'm out of touch) will also slow to a crawl.
Microsoft have been good at (well, successful at) operating systems and office software. Their mistake is believing that the same strategy can be extended to maintain a dominant position in other fields that didn't even exist when they first became dominant.
Most likely outcome of a purchase? Five years down the line it is spun off as a separate business again, related to Microsoft by shares only.
A friend who used to work for Prodigy once told me that they had a peek at the MSN infrastructure and they discovered that in the mega-portal space, Windows requires twice as much hardware per unit of load as Unix systems. Yahoo is of course built around Unix. Are they really going to try to move that whole infrastructure over? Look at how long it took them to convert Hotmail.
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Wonder how much additional it'll cost to convert Yahoo's BSD servers to Windows. Remember how long (and how many failed attempts) there were to convert HotMail from Solaris?
Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.
Market cap for YHOO is 44.99 billion, so $50b is in line, 10% or so premium.
Here in Ontario, at least in the national capital region, there are two major internet players, Rogers and Bell Canada(Sympatico). Rogers and Yahoo! are in bed together, MSN and Sympatico likewise. It would be interesting to see how things play out if the deal does go through.
Wonder how much additional it'll cost to convert Yahoo's BSD servers to Windows. Remember how long (and how many failed attempts) there were to convert HotMail from Solaris?
If they do that, their share will drop from 38% to whatever they have now. Just look at what they have done to Amazon's search - my wife says it's unusable and quit going there. If they convert Yahoo over to their stuff like they did Yahoo, there will be no difference between Yahoo and their own search and their share will fall back to what it is today and then further. You would think that Google eating Hotmail's lunch would have taught them a lesson. The data they get would also soon lose it's value if they can't figure out how to use it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
$50,000,000,000 seems like a lot for yahoo
It's not a lot for Yahoo, but it's a lot for Microsoft. Yes, even Microsoft.
Despite their huge revenue and profits, Microsoft currently "only" has $25 billion in the bank. So they couldn't do a straight purchase of Yahoo, they'd have to do a stock swap and maybe some borrowing, which would be a merger rather than a takeover. (In fact, that's how I'm seeing it described in other news reports.) It wouldn't be MS swallowing up Yahoo and dictating who stays and who goes. It would be some of Yahoo and some of MS mixed together.
I can't see that this is what MS would want. This is not how they do business. They're not going to let some Yahoo schlub come in and take over Steve Ballmer's job, and they're not going to want a situation where Yahoo's Hotjobs division is suddenly leading the development of MS Office. But these are the kinds of weird things that happen in mergers.
I think it's more likely that they'll try to do some sort of exclusive search deal with them, where Yahoo searches are done through Windows Live. This would still be a huge deal because Yahoo's invested a lot in their search tech over the past few years (as has MS). So you're probably still talking a multi-billion dollar deal here. But it's one way the two companies could join forces against Google without an outright merger.
Once they buy Yahoo, do they transition it into a new form of MSN, thereby killing everything that was cool about Yahoo? Or do they un-MSN the current Microsoft web properties?
Hotmail!
Amazon Search!
Zune!
They keep taking and ruining winners, delivering to the public exactly what no one wants. Hotmail was cool, then M$ bought it and spent a fortune converting it to M$ software, loading it with adds and making it suck. Google mail kicked their ass. Amazon used to have a good search, then along came M$. There's nothing wrong with the electronics factories that make iPod and all the rest of the wold's music players, but Zune is a squirting loser. Is a picture emerging here?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Shouldn't you be doing something useful?
Microsoft's market capitalisation is $291.69B (according to Google). If they spent their cash reserves, they would have to raise another $25bn, which is around 8.6% of their market capitalisation. It doesn't seem unreasonable that they could borrow this much. The resulting company would, at a rough approximation, be valued at around $335bn, so would have a debt of about 7.5% of its total value, which is not particularly high.
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This reminds me of when Netscape and Yahoo were in talks to merge. They were going to move the headquarters to Israel and call the new company Net'n'Yahoo.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
No, no. The context is more analogous to the "drinkability" of Budweiser, as alleged in the little soliloquy on cans sold in the U.S.