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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.'"
Didn't Yahoo's stock price go up from this, while the price of MSFT stock went down? Isn't Microsoft doing more harm to themselves?
Besides, I thought Balmer was in charge now. What's with all this talk about Bill?
TFA is being hyperbolic to claim that the purchase bid "alone has some value for Microsoft." Not quite. We're definitely in "a little bit of both" territory here
MS was serious about its announcement about buying yahoo. If yahoo had been openly amenable to the idea, then the deal would be moving forward right now.
The secondary effect (since yahoo was NOT amenable) was to destabilize yahoo, who is a competitor.
So, MS did a cost/benefit actuarial analysis and found that if they bought yahoo for a certain price, then they would benefit. Yahoo doesn't want to sell, but MS still gains b/c of the uncertainty that the bid caused. It was a win/win situation for them. This is how big business works.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Being at the "top of its market" is a liability - it forces you to look beyond your core business in hopes of continuing to expand. This is what happened to Borland - at one point, Borland owned the programming languagess market, with a 66% market share - more than Microsoft and everyone else combined. Then they went nuts. "Desktop / Professional / Enterprise" versions of compilers were one fo the first signs that rot was setting in. So was the buying and selling of WordPerfect and dBase. The dBase acquisition made sense - it let them compete directly with CA-Clipper. Dumping it later on didn't.
Apple didn't get smart until it had it' near-death experience.
So if Yahoo! isn't at the "top of their game" they can afford to concentrate on what they're doing. Microsoft, on the other hand, has nowhere to go bud down - their #1 competitor is themselves (see Vista vs. XP as a good example).
"Redmond's real goal may be simply to poach people from Yahoo, and this deal could help them do just that.'"
I think not. It's more likely that Google would do so, I expect that their recruiters are quite busy calling Yahoo employees at the moment. If this is Microsoft's goal they've just aimed a double-barreled shotgun at their feet and pulled the trigger. They just gave their no. 1 competitor a huge opportunity. Where would you, as a brilliant Yahoo employee, work next? Google or Microsoft?
"I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy"
I know a lot of people who use Google as their primary search engine, I know lots of people who use Yahoo for searching and mail, I even know people who prefer to use Ask. Even still there are some who use some hijacked browser page to search. However I have not met one person who really uses Live/MSN to search. I don't think for most people Yahoo is going away soon, most have mail accounts there and of course will use it to check their mail, and unless MS's search engine has new and different features then Yahoo and Google I doubt they will gain marketshare. For most people, they choose search engines from convience not features and Google and Yahoo are rooted in their minds and browser's homepage more then MSN/Live.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
Perhaps you can't forgive the pun. But...
There seems to be nothing that can pull the Geek out of denial.
Microsoft posted breathtaking results in its first and second quarters. 15-20% growth in Windows. In Office. In servers. In home entertainment.
That kind of growth isn't fueled by massive "upgrades" to Win XP.
67 cents of every new retail dollar spent on PC software goes to Microsoft Office.
Microsoft gambled on "the ribbon" and won.
For the quarter, Microsoft sales increased 30 percent in emerging markets, 20 percent in established markets like Europe and 15 percent in the United States. Microsoft has become very well insulated from a recession in the states.
Online services are still posting a loss, but ad revenues are up damn near 40% from fiscal 2007 to $623 million.
There are 427 million Windows Live IDs.
Which suggests that estimates of one billion Windows users world-wide are on the money.
Microsoft has been paying dividends, buying back stock. It holds $20 billion in liquid reserves and doesn't owe a dime to anyone.
Microsoft Q2 2008 By The Numbers
If MS buys Yahoo, what happens to Zimbra? Yahoo just bought them, and I'm 100% sure MS will kill that project the day they take over, they don't want any competition for exchange, and certainly not open source competition.
Zimbra might not be the greatest software, but it is in my opinion the best open source collaboration/email software out there. It is the only serious competitor to exchange in the open source world. And it will be gone if MS completes this takeover.
Personally I suspected Microsoft's offer might be fake pretty early on. I mean, it can't be 100% fake, because if Yahoo! were to immediately agree, then Microsoft would have to go through with it, or lose face (and a lot of it). So there is some degree of truth in the offer. But Ballmer might think that the deal has a 95% chance of not succeeding (due to Yahoo! dismissing it, regulatory issues, etc.), and that in that 95% case he manages to screw Yahoo! up big time.
As for why Microsoft would want to screw with Yahoo!, my reasoning as I explained it to someone the other day is this. First, Microsoft would screw with Google if it could, but it can't use this trick there. So Yahoo! is the target, as follows (numbers are made up here, just to make a point): Say Google has 50% market share, Yahoo! has 30% and Microsoft has 10%. If Yahoo is screwed with, it might lose 10% to drop to 20%. In theory 5% might go to Google, 5% to Microsoft, giving us Google 55%, Yahoo! 20%, Microsoft 15%. Note that this helps Google at the same time as it helps Microsoft, but in simple terms, Microsoft has gained 50% market share (10% to 15%). From there Microsoft is at a better vantage point to challenge Google. Or, in other terms: First Microsoft fought with 80% of the market; now it fights with 75% of the market.
Another way to see it is that Microsoft wants to be #2 instead of #3. Any playing fairly always takes more time.
Go Blizzard! They not only run on Macintosh, they run on Linux with Wine too.