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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.
Well, they obviously don't believe the share price represents the value of the company. No-one accepts a takeover at the current market price for shares. But think about it this way: suppose you had shares in Yahoo: you could take $31 for them now, or hold on to them so you can profit from shareholder dividends, and possibly sell them for much more later, too.
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 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
Well, they obviously don't believe the share price represents the value of the company.
... or honesty ... or something ... disturbing.
So, they could buy the stock for $12, thought it was worth more than $31, and weren't buying more?
I find their lack of faith
I'm a nature photographer.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Did anyone else find it funny that the bid also came the day after the DOJ stopped its oversight over all but one area of Microsoft's business practices? Unfortunately, slashdot and others reported it like the DOJ actually extended some kind of meaningful oversight, but in truth, just the opposite. "The US Department of Justice has extended its anti-trust oversight of Microsoft by two years. This only applies to the requirement that Microsoft make protocol documentation available to competitors, though. All of the other requirements have expired, and Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly did not give the states complaining the full five years of oversight they requested."
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
>>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.
Fortunately, part of Google's current "sexiness" comes from them embracing various standards and open-source projects that allow them to "interoperate", whereas Microsoft famously tries to hold on to its "infrastructural lock-in" with stuff like MS Office document formats and file-system formats.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The reason tech people don't worry about a Google monopoly is we realize Google is not and can not be a monopoly, because the markets Google operates in have low barriers to entry. Yes, techies trust Google more than they trust Microsoft, but trust in Google is not necessary to realize that Google simply can't acquire monopoly power the way Microsoft did. Without high barriers to entry it is impossible for Google to come anywhere *near* the market share percentages Microsoft continues to enjoy in the OS and office software markets (>90%).
Furthermore, Google shows little interest in erecting barriers to entry; quite the opposite in fact, Google has always fought to keep those barriers *low*. Witness the ease of switching from GMail to another webmail provider: automatic forwarding and free POP/IMAP access make it far easier than, say, Microsoft's Hotmail. Also witness their lobbying for net neutrality: while there is obviously an element of self-interest in not wanting to pay ISP extortion fees, a non-neutral net could be a huge barrier to entry in Google's market, potentially in the end being to Google's benefit. So far, Google has rejected such tactics.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
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.
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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.
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.
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