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Is Microsoft just Screwing with Yahoo's Mind?
The Narrative Fallacy writes "This week Cringely offers up a speculative piece asserting that Microsoft might not really care if its bid to buy Yahoo succeeds or not — Bill Gates just wants to disrupt Yahoo and poach the company's employees. 'Microsoft's offer for Yahoo has thrown that company and several others into a tizzy. Yahoo can't be getting much work done, that's for sure ... Redmond's real goal may be simply to poach people from Yahoo, and this deal could help them do just that.' Cringley says there is plenty of precedent for Microsoft's behavior — Microsoft's bids for Borland and for Intuit back in the 1990s sent both companies into a tailspin. 'A failed Microsoft bid, even one involving a termination fee, could lead to horrific results for the company. Remember that Yahoo is staggering here while Intuit was at the top of its market and its game.'"
but is Microsoft capable of this? I'd say that's a given.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Yahoo is treading water. Microsoft is treading water. Neither company has innovated to grow new business for the last 5+ years. Meanwhile, Google has created growth. It has built and grown a large, growing advertising business. Now Microsoft has a paw on Yahoo, treading water next to it.
anything like fair?
/. this should come as no surprise AT ALL.
Sure, all MS has to do is either make their products better than anyone else's or scare everyone from investing in a competitor's business and products. Either one will result in Microsoft's favor.
Business-wise, since Google isn't going to suddenly lose market-share it is necessary to gain market share, either by purchasing it, or causing your own product to gain market share.
Some very large corporations in North America have been found guilty of this same type of practice. With all the MS bashing on
Whether they actually buy Yahoo or not, MS wins in the business side.
Sure, to the average joe it is hard to see the win, but if Yahoo loses revenues MS will begin to take them (what Google doesn't get anyway). In the business of becoming the largest in your field of endeavor having better products/services than your competition is only marginally more important (if at all) than your competitor being worse than you at the game of business. We all know that MS is very successful at business, not so much so at creating innovative products and services.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
...where someone writes about some random theory in an attempt to milk the MSFT+YHOO story without having any new facts to report.
Please keep in mind that stock price inflation is due to "premium" put up MS and speculators have driven up the price which *would* fall down if the deal doesn't go through.
I'd expect a lot of speculators to actually short the stock.
All in all, for a serious business, it's *not* a good thing to be in this situation. Even in best case it'd rock the boat and cause heart-burns and unrest whether the deal goes through or not.
- mritunjai
... that Microsoft's business acumen in providing a better product over the years has overflowed into their Corporate Finance department.....
Jokes apart, there is a possible explanation which implies no wickedness on the part of MS: MS investments in his search engine + ad seller has been less effective than Yahoo's. MS would never be allowed to bid for Google, so it must settle for second best, which is not a bad place to be if you are much lower in the totem pole.
Given the cash pile burning a hole in MS pocket the cash pile burning a hole in MS pocket, the pressure to put the money to work somewhere, or return it to shareholders, is enormous, and they cannot or would not invest it in making a better product overall.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
I've ever heard. And I've played catch with rock hammers.
MS did it because they wanted to consolidate a larger advertising and search engine position, and a major internet portal. It was probably still a bad decision, but who can really say what the results would have been ten years down the line?
Look at what MS Stock did. It had broken out of a major rut--a rut not justified by its earnings--for the first time in years following an earnings report last year. Now it's down 24% off its high. Twenty-Four percent. Balmer has lost $3.6 Billion, Gates has lost twice that, and even employees who've only lost twenty or fifty or seventy thousand aren't happy about it--because that is a big chunk of their savings. Now that price change isn't all yahoo, by any stretch of the imagination. But a big chunk of is it from the Yahoo offer.
You don't take that hit for an offer you aren't interested in following through on.
Nobody makes a $40B+ offer just to screw with another company. That's WAY too much money. While business disruption might be a desirable side effect, especially if the merger doesn't go through, it isn't why MS made the offer. When MS tried to buy Intuit, it was because they wanted to dominate personal finance software, not because they wanted to screw with Intuit. If memory serves they were blocked from the merger by the government due to the effective monopoly the merger would cause.
If I was a shareholder (I'm not) and it ever came out that MS was doing that with their cash hoard instead of finding market beating investment opportunities, I'd have my lawyer on the phone faster than you could say "class action lawsuit".
I am just glad that the Asus EEE has taken off,since it would make buying Xandros more expensive than some of the other Linux Distros out there(I like my Xandros just the way it is,thank you very much).If I had to bet,it would be Novell or one of the older Linux or BSDs.I also think that moves like trying to buy Yahoo shows that they have no direction at the top,which is going to make it that much harder to make a decent OS,as design by committee is never good.
I think the era of a company pounding out an entire OS from scratch is coming to an end. It is just too risky and too costly an operation for even someone like MSFT,and the rise of the low end markets where they simply can't compete(and where they are shooting themselves in the foot by not keeping WinXP) is simply going to make it harder for them as time marches on.You really have to give Steve Jobs credit for seeing the writing on the wall and building OSX out of BSD.It minimizes his costs while giving him a rock solid base to work from.Anyway my .02c on the subject,YMMV.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Which department decided to bundle Microsoft's desktop apps into what is known as MS Office? Answer = Microsoft's Marketing Dept.
You must be very young to believe Microsoft simply BOUGHT all of their products, or that everything successful is simply the result of their money.(Did I mention MS Office?)
Love them or hate them, but you would be foolish to think Microsoft never built anything on their own towards their success. They didn't buy Excel, they didn't buy Exchange Server, which spawned Active Directory, so give them their due.
Nobody told the folks at Lotus or Netscape that they got beat by money, rather than products that kicked theirs in the teeth. Who did they buy Visual Studio or the .NET Framework from? Something tells me, Microsoft will be just fine for the long term.
It amazes me that the geek still fantasies about MS-DOS.
Microsoft was incorporated in 1975 and by 1980 was dominant in languages for the microcomputer. Microsoft was moving up and moving fast.
There would be an MBASIC for the IBM PC and much, much more to come.
Gates promised to deliver a cheap, serviceable, OS in time for the projected launch of the IBM PC, an OS that would sell for about 1/6 the price of CP/M 86.
That was all IBM needed to know, that was all IBM wanted to know.
But it was Bill Gates who had the imagination to see the enormous potential for growth and profit in the MS-DOS PC that was almost - but not in its beginning - an IBM PC-clone.
Anders is the Darth Vader of the software industry.
Ever wonder why so much ofAnders is brilliant, he could have created his own software company and did something like .Net that actually was light weight, fast and X-Platform, but instead, .net is .Garbage because it is done the "Microsoft Way".
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!