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Yahoo May Re-Consider Google Alliance, Rebuff Microsoft
anastasd writes "Reuters is reporting that Yahoo might consider a business alliance with Google as a way to top a $44.6 billion takeover proposal by Microsoft. 'Yahoo management is considering revisiting talks it held with Google several months ago on an alliance as an alternative to Microsoft's bid, that source said. At $31 a share, Yahoo believes the bid undervalues the company, two sources said. A second source close to Yahoo said it had received a procession of preliminary contacts by media, technology, telephone and financial companies. But the source said they were unaware whether any alternative bid was in the offing.'"
Do I like Yahoo? Not really. But I don't really like Google or MS either. The less of these online service providers there are, the worse it will be for consumers. I hope Yahoo continues to exist in some form or another just so there are more players in the marketplace. That means more choice, more competition and a better experience for users.
Last I checked, $31 is greater than $12.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Google can use the 45bn in far better ways by cutting into new markets & technologies (eg. Android).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
too bad TimeWarner or CNN or some other big media company could not bail yahoo out, i rather see something like that than for microsoft getting their dirty paws on them...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Yahoo thinks they're worth more than $44.6 billion? What exactly does yahoo do, or own, that makes money?
Yahoo is just acting like this in order to get a higher price from MS.
Google + Yahoo! wouldn't fly with the antitrust regulators.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
They are just jacking up the price. The company will be sold. Once a company is in play, it is very hard to take it off the market.
Once the directors receive an offer, it is their duty to figure out whether their shareholders are better off with Yahoo alone or not. If they figure out that it is better selling (I am sure they did already), it is their obligation under current Delaware law to auction the company. That's exactly what they are doing. There isn't a single transaction that closes at the starting price.
If the directors decide that it is better going alone, it will end up with a Proxy fight and a lot of lawsuits (those will happen anyway)
Right now, arbitrageurs are going long on Yahoo and short on MS.
From the article...
"Few natural bidders exist beside Google
that could engage in a bidding war, and
Google would be unlikely to win approval
from antitrust regulators, some Wall Street
analysts said on Friday."
So, um, it's not likely to happen.
** Yawn **
It's safe to move along.
How to Download YouTube Videos
500 million users. $3.75 billion a year in profit. Market cap of $40 billion.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
He heard it before we did.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
Yahoo is also an ISP in Japan with a rather large penetration.
You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
Over the past 3 months, Yahoo's stock has been dropping like a rock -- from $33 to $19. It jumped back up to $28 after the Microsoft takeover announcement, but that just means Microsoft will have to kick in another couple billion to get the deal through.
And it also means that Google would have to pay *EVEN MORE* than that in order to make a better offer than Microsoft. Why would Google spend $46+ Billion just to buy a competitor who is sinking fast? Just doesn't make sense. Google has a lot of money, but I doubt they're willing to spend *THAT MUCH* just to piss off Microsoft.
Google and yahoo are neck and neck (with google slightly ahead for the last while). That gives google 1 & 3, or 50% vs 30% if you combine youtube + google.
Now look at http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=YHOO&t=2y&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=GOOG
Yahoo on the way down and Google (relatively) up.
Sure, Google could buy Yahoo for a quick rush, but in the longer term (1-2 years) yahoo will just fade by themselves unless they do something very interesting (which they have not done in a long time).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Yahoo Mail has many more users than Gmail, and tends to have a more mass-market (less techie) demographic, especially if you consider Yahoo Groups sort of related. Yahoo Messenger is of course orders of magnitude more popular than Google Talk.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
i have a sneaking suspicion there is another smaller .com bubble forming. especially when yahoo start talking about being under valued at 44 billion.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Whether or not Yahoo! knows it -- they need Microsoft. They've been bleeding the last several years with missteps and delays with Panama. Let me see if the DOJ would approve a deal that would give a 90%+ search engine monopoly to Google. Doubt it. Microsoft like it or not is the best option for Yahoo!
This is interesting given the timing of the Microsoft bid and the state of the wireless auction. Could Microsoft have waited until they believed Google had committed its resources to a spectrum bid before making a move to take Yahoo?
They're #3, but like Google, they came by that position honestly (MSN got to its slot by 'dint of default'). It may be anecdotal, but Yahoo has a lot of income that comes in from places that you and I may find unlikely. They also have a rather solid set of services that 1) doesn't require Windows or a Passport Account, and 2) is relatively uncluttered and straightforward when compared to MSN. When it comes to non-search functions, Yahoo is actually IMHO better than Google in a lot of areas, simply because those areas don't have that 'beta' feel to it that Google sometimes does, or that 'we require possession of your soul before installing this' feel that the MSN does (e.g. messenger services*).
While I pretty much use Google for most of my stuff nowadays, There is still Yahoo Finance, among a bucket of little things that make it useful to me.
This is just anecdotal, but I know I'm not alone, and Yahoo does have a large and loyal following. I could see them diminish over time perhaps, but not necessarily die off.
* I use Pidgin everywhere now, but long ago, my Mac wound up with MSN and Yahoo Messenger on it due to social and work demands... and GAIM wasn't IMHO a viable option there.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
They handle so much data that to me it doesnt matter too much about their privacy policy.
;)
It is impossible for them to be reading my email or anything else I wouldnt like.
Google Maps is made by Aussies you know.
Its far better than WhereIs for most things although it doesnt function as a phone book.
I hate WhereIs's UI.
You know - the thing that bugs me most about the tech crowd is when I compare what I hear the real world's opinion of the competitive framework with what users on rags like Slashdot have to say. It is an incredibly huge gulf. It makes the tech community look hopelessly naive and biased.
I am a postgrad of competition law right now so I know quite a lot about it. Firstly, the real world doesn't believe Microsoft is any more or less evil than any other monopoly - past or present. In fact the opposite is more likely to be true. All of the conduct ultimately condemned by the courts (primarily restrictive licensing practices) were instigated by people who have since left the company. Further, Microsoft is now under close scrutiny by the US and EU authorities.
Google on the other hand is not.
One thing the shapers of modern competition law understood (yes these issues were thought about long before any of us were born) was that lasting unregulated monopolies are inevitably harmful to consumers. Google might have the right spirit of innovation and openness at the moment but one day working for Google won't be sexy anymore, an innovative culture will be harder to nurture and Google shareholders will still demand that Google returns a profit. The next best thing to innovation is infrastructural lock-in like what Microsoft (and Bell, IBM etc) have achieved. Which means the company can earn ongoing monopoly rents with minimal ongoing investment.
Best way to prevent this inevitable evil? Force the infrastructure to become a shared resource of multiple companies by making it economically less efficient for all of them not to inter-operate. If competition doesn't achieve this, the regulators will and history has shown that regulation of monopolies often leads to even worse effects than the alternative.
Check out this blog post by Google's Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond on Google's Corporate Blog. Google clearly sees this deal as a direct threat to the future of the Internet. They are not going to let Microsoft walk all over them like Netscape. Microsoft's bid for Yahoo! was a declaration of war:
Yahoo! and the future of the Internet
2/03/2008 11:45:00 AM
Posted by David Drummond, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development
and Chief Legal Officer
The openness of the Internet is what made Google -- and Yahoo! --possible. A good idea that users find useful spreads quickly. Businesses can be created around the idea. Users benefit from constant innovation. It's what makes the Internet such an exciting place.
So Microsoft's hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It's about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.
Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies -- and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.
Could the acquisition of Yahoo! allow Microsoft -- despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses -- to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the Internet? In addition, Microsoft plus Yahoo! equals an overwhelming share of instant messaging and web email accounts. And between them, the two companies operate the two most heavily trafficked portals on the Internet. Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to
unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors' email, IM, and web-based services? Policymakers around the world need to ask these questions -- and consumers deserve satisfying answers.
This hostile bid was announced on Friday, so there is plenty of time for these questions to be thoroughly addressed. We take Internet openness, choice and innovation seriously. They are the core of our culture. We believe that the interests of Internet users come first --and should come first -- as the merits of this proposed acquisition are examined and alternatives explored.
MSN is the default on new computers so the only people that use it are the ones that don't know any better. On the other hand pretty much everyone who uses Yahoo does so because they chose to do so. Microsoft has too much hubris to keep Yahoo's technology, they're going to change it all to Windows and .NET and just like what happened with Hotmail it will suck in then end.
Where are those users going to go? I'd wager the vast majority of them will go straight to Google.
Google doesn't need to buy Yahoo, they're going to get the users anyway
The Anti-Blog
I think there have been a good number of misconceptions about Microsoft's $45 billion offer for Yahoo!, and there are a few points that we ought to make note of.
Firstly, Microsoft's valuation indicates their valuation of Yahoo! being part of Microsoft. Synergies account for the higher value!
Secondly, with the offer, Yahoo! is now "in play", and there is a consequent expectation that someone such as Google may come along and make an offer. Since it is in play, people expect an offer that comes at a premium (which of course gets priced in!). Now, this is implicitly priced into the 62% premium that Microsoft has offered, and they have set it high enough (in their estimate) so as to price out any potential offers from others.
If Google decides to get involved, they have plenty of antitrust concerns in terms of an overall takeover bid. Can they take a play out of Microsoft's playbook (e.g., 1.6% stake in Facebook) and offer a larger premium for a substantial stake of the company (e.g., $60/share for say 35% of Yahoo!)? I would not be surprised if we see such a strategy.
Well, I'd agree that many of those accounts are no longer active. On the other hand, I suspect that all that personal information sitting in those dead accounts is worth quite a bit to some people. Page views is not the only way to make money.
Remember Yahoo isn't just used in the US, it has international versions as well. There's six billion people in the world and probably over 2 billion have regular internet access by now (my guess, no source). 25% of internet users using Yahoo regularly is not a stretch of the imagination by any means.
Not really, remember the first dot-com bubble was caused by people trying to value companies that produced no profit and used business model's no one had ever tried out before. (My favorite was pets.com which insisted on selling most of its merchandise at below cost. Genius move guys!) It's been over 10 years since then and company's have figured out how to make money online, which makes valuing the price of their stock much easier.
You're right in thinking Yahoo's vision of themselves is inflated though. Remember their market cap was about 2/3 of what it is now before the bid, and that's right about were they belong given management's horrendous execution.
The sun beams down on a brand new day, No more welfare tax to pay, Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light...
No, can't complete joke. Still lame. Not funny. No chair jokes have ever, can ever, or will ever be funny. Stop insulting our humor glands!
Relax. Pull up a chair.
Anyone got a light for my sig?
I don't think you understand what Google does. Your post infers that you see it as a technology company (you used the words innovation and openness, then go on to use the term "infrastructural lock-in like..." followed by "inter-operate" in the final paragraph). But in reality, Google is, at the moment, an advertising company that just so happens to specialize in technology... From Wiki:
"Most of Google's revenue is derived from advertising programs. For the 2006 fiscal year, the company reported US$10.492 billion in total advertising revenues and only US$112 million in licensing and other revenues."
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google
So, I congratulate you on being a postgrad of competition law, but knowledge of the law doesn't mean anything if you don't understand the subject that you are trying to apply it to (IE: an advertising monopoly, NOT a tech monopoly). But what do I know? I'm just a naive and biased "techie" after all.
I've always wondered, what exactly does/would Google get out of doing that? I use Gmail. If Google data mined my mail, they would get nothing. I don't use email with my friends (i'm in the age bracket that doesn't use email according to that one semi-recent /. article) so all my mail is either from colleges or "click this link" forum activation mail.
In theory, the real data worth mining would be either of my parent's as both of them run their own businesses. However, what can they do with the data? Mine it so they can show targeted ad's to them for Quickbooks or Lexus-Nexus or whatever? Oh wait, they already do.
Seriously, unless your dating Larry/Sergey/Eric's Ex, why would they ever care to look through your mail?
The exact same thing that Microsoft would be acquiring. Granted it would be more of a benefit to Microsoft than to Google at this stage in the game, but who wouldn't want the #1 Website ranked in the world?. MSN had the position for the first half of 2007, but now they're crashing hard, and they never could beat out yahoo in the five years before that. Now the question is this: Which would you rather see, MSN fall further from the #5 slot, or Microsoft acquire Yahoo and be in control of the current #1 position?
Granted, M$ takes control of Yahoo, it's probably not going to be #1 for much longer (I know I'd be dropping my Yahoo mail accounts and probably joining my wife on Gmail), but since when do investors care what's going to happen, they want immediate returns on investment. And having their company say "We just bought the #1 spot" sounds real good to stupid masses with money to burn.
But then, that's just my $0.02USD (has the Peso out-done us yet on the conversion rate?)
They link it up with private data held by other companies, and then they sell it to other ad companies, who then go on to pester you, perhaps send you target you with potentially embarrassing ads. Or they sell the info to prospective employers.
Argue all you want over who has what, but what you had AND have does not compare to what you can have. The reason that I say that is that Yahoo does not make it worth a techies time to either stay there OR come to them. Yahoo treats their techies like a bunch of well, yahoos. Very little incentives to stay there. In fact, they have treated their sales ppl like Gods, and yet these are the bozos who will leave a company at the first wind.
MS USE to have something to offer by having a stock that would increase. But the company overall was worthless which is why once somebody made the money via stock, they are gone. These days, MS stock is over priced and has not really changed in price for a long time. Worse, they have also gone to treating their sales ppl like gods, while the techies get far less.
Google is still in that phase where not only does the stock continue to grow (overall), but the techies (those that come up with good ideas ) are treated decently. I suspect that the sales ppl are also treated well, but the techies can make a portion of the money on their ideas. In fact, Google will help you to spin off if good enough. The other 2 simply steal your work.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Also, Yahoo! have a much better position in China that Google have. A lot of people here have a Yahoo! email address, but I don't know anyone with a Gmail address. Does Google Mail have a Chinese option, I wonder? I know Yahoo! does, and it even allows pop3 access for free, last I heard.
Of course, that can change quickly...
Max.
Yahoo's new marketing tag:
"We're the New AOL, Like in the Olde Days!"
why is it that live.com looks like the google site?
But then its not really infringing on my privacy at all.
I become a statistic in their models and anonymous.
It happens everywhere.
I'd rather it be Google than another company.
Don't look at historical data (3 months to a year old), look at the trend since then. Yahoo is flatline and Google is on the up.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Really?
Is that why when the US government was demanding search data, that Google was the only company willing to butt heads with the government to protect privacy, while Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft all volunteered private data?
To say that Google lacks a privacy policy is pure fiction. http://www.google.com/privacypolicy.html
Next time check your facts.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Yahoo is the provisioner of email to Rogers, a very large ISP (and cell phone provider, among other things) here in Canada. Rogers' competitor, Sympatico is allied with MSN. So, there will be some impact here if this goes through.
The implications of Microsoft bidding $44.6 B for Yahoo are many, and they are all bad news. Bad for customers, bad for the internet at large, bad for employees, and bad for open source.
Google acquiring Yahoo is a lesser evil, but still one less competitor to keep the others honest.
But with an offer on the table, and a possible counter offer/alliance from Google, something is going to happen, and it will have profound implications on many people.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Because $31 now, for $18 may, according to some, be better than i guess about $38 some time in the near to far future.
To add some real-world numbers: GOOG peaked at almost $750 last november. Even though analysts valued it in the $900-$1000 range, it dropped a tiny bit since then, just some 30%. Also, with valuations ranging from $600-$900 (and a mean valuation of about $725 over some 30 brokers) it managed to lose another 8.5% over the course of the last trading day.
Have you got somewhere from Google saying they don't do that? Because its certainly a typical move companies like Google, so it would follow that Google also does it.
Although your claim at being able to predict the future does make me question whether or not you are a rational person when it comes to Google.
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/my/general.html
I'm not that keen on Google either. I don't like the idea of my email being read, even if it is only software scanning for keywords for advertising. Several years ago on Slashdot there was an article about how Google white washed images of the Tianmamen Square Massacre out of the Chinese version of their site. I can't get the images of the real images versus the ones google used out of my head.
I guess if yahoo merges with either Microsoft or Google I will just have to go with some small third party email provider.
In the Alexa top 100, Yahoo! only has two domains, .com and .co.jp. Google has 10 domains in only the top 50, from .com to .co.in. I'm not counting sister sites like Flickr or Orkut here, just the search front pages in the various localizations.
If you total Yahoo!'s top 100 (just the two) you get 29.41% reach (3 month average), but Google's domains total to 44.42%, and that's only the top 50. So in reality, Google's search front end has 50% greater reach than Yahoo!'s search front.
So, amiright?!?
Damn, I already moderated this topic. Now I'll have to log in with my sock puppet to comment.
Have you ever read the Google and GMail Privacy Policies?
Some key facts (read: not a 100% complete copy/paste from the site) from the Google Privacy Policy (http://www.google.com/privacypolicy.html):
Navicula hydraulica plena anguilarum est. Omnes castelli tuus nostri sunt. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
Your threat is empty. Yahoo's management doesn't make the decision whether to merge with Microsoft. There are two ways it can happen:
So yeah, don't waste your time barking up the wrong tree.
Are you adequate?
I have used web based email service sine hotmail 1995 or so. I have gone into hotmail, linuxmail, latinmail, hotmail again and lastly gmail. I have never found client based mail systems (like outlook or thunderbird or eudora, or whatever) useful as you have to actually configure and do lots of things just to check your inbox.
That being said, some months ago I was talking with an American guy who is working in my office (he is doing his second PhD in London and working here part time) and he told me that the reason he does not have one of those web mail accounts is not for what they do *now* for the information, but because you do not know what they can do in the future. Once your information is public, it remains public forever. And you may think it is not public giving it to any of those companies, but it really is, the only thing that makes it non public is that nobody cares about it. But if in the future you had some issue that made *someone* important care about you, I am pretty shure they will find means to obtain that information.
I keep using gmail to this date, but I am really sure the American government has plenty of information about me by now. Fortunately, I plan to keep out of the USA and keep in a country where they have no real place of invading.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Microsoft spending $44bn on Yahoo! is such a bad idea for Microsoft that I really hope the deal goes through. I feel a little sad for Yahoo!, but I think they're in trouble anyway, and they are getting plenty of money out of it. And I don't think the deal "undervalues" Yahoo!; I think it's pretty much downhill from here on for Yahoo! no matter what.
I'm fairly certain that Google is:
a) Not typical
b) Not all that predictable
Rationale: How many other Google's are there? They've become a part of our LANGUAGE, that is not typical. Also - Everyone was predicting what the gPhone would be. They were wrong, it wasn't a "phone" it was a phone platform. Who predicted Google would be going after the 700MHz spectrum? Where is the Google OS?
Not typical, not predictable. Is that good? Or bad? I don't know.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
In a way, I'd love to see M$ sink 40+ billion into Yahoo! And I do mean sink. What possible value does M$ intend to gain from this transaction? This reminds me of AMD's recent acquisition of ATI, which they are still struggling to digest. On the other hand, while I want to see M$ face a lot more competition, if only so they'll improve their products, having them make a huge mistake could have serious consequences. Or maybe they'll finally give up on Chairman Bill's megalomaniac business model, stick to what they are good at (relatively speaking), and actually produce quality software in the desktop PC and server spaces. I said I was a hater...
If your American buddy is so paranoid, then he should stay away from the internet altogether. All email is sent unencrypted, so can be read just by sniffing, even if you run your own mail server. Every time that you visit a web page, you leave a trail in more than one place. You do a DNS lookup request which your ISP can then log and save as a record of which sites you visit. You then connect to an external server, which itself logs your IP, referring page, time, date, etc.
:)
And that's just what you leave behind without any kind of active searching going on by a third party. Most traffic isn't encrypted, so an interested third party could record just about every little nugget of information that you pass along. An interested third party might be able to bust into your box, get your cookie information, or gather information in other ways.
Even TOR won't keep you safe as you don't know who is monitoring the exit nodes.
In short, if you are afraid that someone will find out that you sometimes surf for midget porn, then don't surf for midget porn - or take the same types of precautions that you would in the real world, which the internet is unfortunately (fortunately?) part of.
I don't even want to know what kind of activity you are involved in which makes you believe that the US government keeps a file on you
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I think you dont really understood the point that the guy made. The problem is not that someone is interested in you or your information now. I know lots of information is pubclicly available when you send it via mail or generally through the internet. However if at this time you are of no interest to the bad guys then they wont be logging your activities. The issue is if you save such activities in a public-third party server (such as google or microsoft or yahoo or whatever), even if you stop using them the minute your government start jailing people that does not bend over, they will be able to get all the information you saved over there (i.e., google complying with China policies, Yahoo giving away information about an account, if they bend over China, why wouldn't they bend over the USA or any other more powerful country?).
:)
I don't even want to know what kind of activity you are involved in which makes you believe that the US government keeps a file on you
You do not have to do something really nasty to be tracked by the government, just Flying through (i.e, to go somewhere else) the USA will get you into their database.
I got a first person account of that, my grandmother went to the USA in the 70s or 80s maybe, and she forgot to handle a small paper when she went out. Ten years later, a cousing went to the USA for vacation and when she was returning they stopped her and asked her where was my grandmother hiding in the USA, they were sure she had illegaly stayed (of course she had not, she lived in Mexico). How did they know she was the granmother of my cousing... we do not know.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I think you mean "WITH ex post facto laws". Ex post facto laws are laws that make something that someone has already done a crime after they have done it, even though it wasn't a crime at the time they did it.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
And you care why? Honestly data-mining isn't a bad thing. I'd rather be spammed about things vaguely relevant to me than random shit. Better to get video game and tv show ads than gay porn and viagra... and breast enhancement ads. I fail to see the harm in giving out information which can't be traced back to me. Its just an algorithm its not like anyone will be reading your emails.