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Gates Explains Microsoft's Need for Yahoo
eldavojohn writes "Perhaps it's obvious to you and perhaps you'll be pleasantly surprised by his answer but Gates revealed to CNet why Microsoft needs Yahoo. From his response, "We have a strategy for competing in the search space that Google dominates today, that we'll pursue that we had before we made the Yahoo offer, and that we can pursue without that. It involves breakthrough engineering. We think that the combination with Yahoo would accelerate things in a very exciting way, because they do have great engineers, they have done a lot of great work. So, if you combine their work and our work, the speed at which you can innovate and get things done is just dramatically more rapid. So, it's really about the people there that want to join in and create a better search, better portal for a very broad set of customers. That's the vision that's behind saying, hey, wouldn't this be a great combination.""
You know, if its the great engineers that they want, why not just allocate $40 million or so to hiring them away from Yahoo? Getting access to Yahoo technology isn't really as big of a deal if they are talking about making something new. And great engineers are good at coming up with ideas anyways. If Microsoft couldn't think of doing things a cheaper way, then I doubt they are going to be able to drop the fat enough to fight Google. They are just throwing money at the problem when there are other ways. They could make a think tank like Xerox PARC with all the engineers they could hire for a fraction of the cost. And it would be a safer investment because what's to stop those engineers from just quiting after the buyout? $40 billion could be better spent.
Microsoft has forgotten that it doesn't take much money to get things done. A guy in a garage Bill, a guy in a garage.
"because they do have great engineers" translation "they have great PROGRAMMERS"...
Microsoft needs more programmers, at cut-rate wages.
Not a bay way to snap up a few good programmers.
No dobt there are a few real engineers are Yahoo, but mostly programmers is what they are after.
Microsoft is pursuing the buyout path because they can. They have a metric shitload of money, so throwing money around is their customary solution to every problem that comes their way.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Microsoft's approach to breakthrough engineering is through acquisitions? Is it just me or do I sense an oxymoron here...
Goodbye Slashdot. You've changed.
"Look, we innovate. We innovate the hell out of stuff. Just yesterday I innovated a donut by taking one off some old guy when I pushed him down a flight of stairs. And Yahoo!, well, we're innovating them right now, and we're going to keep innovating them until they stop moving. Then we'll use their bloated corpse to innovate any Google employee that gets in our way."
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
"Without Yahoo, we are years behind, and likely to stay that way"
Am I right or am I right?
I think Bill has gotten too used to thinking in terms of his own bank account. He should be able to retain some pretty impressive headhunters for a lot less than $20 million per engineer. He might even be able to hold aside some money to keep his $40 billion from leaving to work for Google the next week.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
from the Cmdr-Taco-needs-a-grammar-checker dept.
Summation 2
Yahoo is acquired by Google, then Yoogle turns around and acquires Microsoft. Classic Pac Man defense.
And here I thought it was because Yahoo's pages are as fugly and user-hostile as Microsoft's. Shows how dumb I am.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I seem to recall that he stated he was retiring. And back in 2000, didn't he quit then, as well?
So, if you combine their work and our work, the speed at which you can innovate and get things done is just dramatically more rapid.
This is the school of thought that thinks if you get nine women pregnant you will have a baby in one month.
Gates Explain's ?
Tie two birds together: although they have four wings, they cannot fly. (The blind man)
why is there an apostrophe in "explain's"?
How can people not know where they go?
from the article: "..things..at least among younger people in the more developed markets just become common sense that that's the way things get done."
Is that how he got Windows done?
-- LP-Research
First, Take a look at http://www.eep.com/merchant/newsite/samples/ee/ee0801.htm, for "Why Most Mergers Fail".
Next, take a look at press releases involving mergers in financial and industrial companies.
Note, how there is highest emphasis on cost savings, and very little mention of ideals and NEW business strategy after the merger.
Lastly, the kind of "merger" you are suggesting is typically done as a buyout of a small company by a much larger company.
See! This is what happens if you drop out of Business School.
For just a 0.1% Fee based on the deal value, I can help provide further advice.
Good Luck!
and if the best & brightest leave to work somewhere else at the moment of acquisition thus benefiting neither yahoo or microsoft, leaving yahoo looking like a building with a few servers & developers workstations and a few secretaries & janitor with a mop & bucket...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I mean, in terms of software DEVELOPMENT you're right. I'd even say "spot on." But in terms of defining how the computer industry does BUSINESS... well, they wrote the playbook of dirty tricks, copyrighted it, and leased it to the rest of the industry. Marketers in the computer industry, no matter where they work, have a picture of Bill Gates on their wall, candles lined underneath, and genuflect to it every time they enter or leave that room.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
You can boil his entire quote down to the above 7 words. Microsoft likes nothing more than to get their name/software/web properties in front of everyone's face. Adding Yahoo and all Yahoo's users to their portfolio is what they want. Imagine if all of a sudden everyone with a @yahoo.com email address automatically had a Passport account... all of a sudden Yahoo messenger is 100% compatible with MSN messenger.
We always knew Comcast was corrupt, here's the proof: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1909890&cid=34545432
This merger comes from the great minds who brought us Reese's Chocolate and Garlic Butter Cups.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
...why they needed all the others they gobbled up: Microsoft acquires, not innovates.
Take great engineers, put them in a crappy company and they'll not be that bright.
Most of the problems (of people sucking) are inside the companies: philosophy work environment, colleagues, etc.
how long until
We all know they've run out of ways to remanufacture their products and make them look new over and over again. We all know that they want to break into the goldmine that is internet advertising. It's not just about breakthroughs and being first to the market anymore though, and Bill knows that. Microsoft have an image problem and that's what holds them back. I believe that the reason he's after Yahoo! isn't for programmers or market share, it's for their image and branding.
Mr. Gates should have been a comedian.
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
Just an hour ago, I spoke to a Zimbra partner, and he informs me that in case MS does get to buy Yahoo, Zimbra would be out of it, to allay antitrust fears. That would mean Zimbra will have to be sold back by Yahoo and bought over by some other company. Is this true? Or is the popularity of Zimbra the reason why Microsoft would buy Yahoo to kill it off?
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Its not only about the engineer. If it were, Microsoft would (and may) go only as far as "due diligence" and get access to Yahoo proprietary information such as the important employee list.
But I think, Microsoft wants to buy users (Flickr, Delicious, Yahoo Mail, etc.). Google is making Microsoft less relevant, and there is some sort of network effect that makes smaller players nearly impossible to catch up. Anyone can duplicate an Ebay, but you can't duplicate the user base. The success of the services have less to do with the technology, and more to do with the users and where they expect to get their information.
I recognise an ongoing bullshit senario when I see one, and this is one!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
"Hi, I am Clippy, Your personal search assistent. It looks like You are looking for porn, would You like a hand?"
"Yahoo! is our search strategy now. We've spent years trying to find a paper clip with a junkyard crane magnet, and we've failed."
Buy Out and ruin a company its the MS way.
We have a strategy for competing in the search space that Google dominates today,
"Ballmer has his panties in a bunch. He said we're going to fucking kill Google, and he gets a little attached sometimes, you know? So now we've got to figure a way to f'ing kill Google."
that we'll pursue that we had before we made the Yahoo offer,
"In case you think we're upset about Yahoo's rejection, we're not. Ballmer's still stuck on the '<expletive> kill Google' thing (do I have to keep saying it?) - he can't even see Yahoo past the bulging vein in his forehead."
<from offstage> "Yes you have got to goddammed keep saying it!" <sound of chair crashing into wall>
and that we can pursue without that.
"OK, we admit he's a little obsessed. But don't think this will divert an painful amount of capital into an a space in which we have utterly failed for years. Because, ummm, we don't want you to think that."
It involves breakthrough engineering.
"All we need is some of that breakthrough engineering stuff. We hear that stuff is all the rage with the kids these days, and we figure if we can get some of it, we'll be all set to *** kill Google."
We think that the combination with Yahoo would accelerate things in a very exciting way,
"We looked around for startups to partner with, so we could copy their technology then dump them, but apparently everyone has heard the compendium of stories that start with Stac. We figure it'll be easier to buy Yahoo. (we figure it would be easier to host a snowman making competition in hell, incidentally) Just have to figure a way past that little, 'Yahoo flipping hates us' thing."
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
'Cause I also wanted to add, off the record, that we are going to f***ing kill Google. Yes, that's F-star-star-star-I-N-G kill Google.
What is that red light for?
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Wouldn't that require Microsoft to innovate? With all the problems of Microsoft combining the two very different cultures, asking Microsoft to innovate at the same time (and some may say, for the first time) may be too much for Microsoft to handle.
Microsoft is way underleveraged for a mature company. With debt as cheap as it is, especially given MSFTs debt rating, they should go into debt whether they buy YHOO or pay out additional dividents.
"for a very broad set" of customers" do you mean we will have to pay to search? not to mention that but if they do get yahoo their stocks will still go down.. not many people are actually behind microsoft on this one.
I've always thought that one of the main reasons Google took off so well is because it WASN'T a portal. Most people want a search engine, not a portal.
I would imagine that most of the people that use Yahoo do so because they DO want a portal, and they know they don't like Microsoft's portal. I realize they want the people at Yahoo, but it just seems to me their strategy of "Lets keep doing the same thing that people already gave up in favor of Google" is silly.
Since MS has never made any significant engineering breakthroughs, why should they now? Everything they did so far was aquire or copy (i.e. steal) technology. This also means that without Yahoo, they have not the faintest chance. Good. This will ensure high-quality platform-independent web-search will remain available.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It is not very well known, but I remember talking to an engineer at Yahoo, and I asked, "How do you make money?" He said, this was a couple years ago, that 60% of all e-commerce sites were hosted by yahoo. Think about that, credit cards, transactions, data, users, etc. M$ would live to control that.
Think of all the anti-competitive stuff they could do. Subtle problems with non-windows platforms or non IE browsers. A requirement of Microsoft Wallet. (Remember that?)
There are a ton of reasons why Yahoo owned by microsoft would be a bad thing for the world. I hope Yahoo remains independent.
... In a failing market for a failing business with failing products, these are the throes of a giant falling. If the acquisition was to go through MS has no intention on enhancing or improving search portals or any other service that Y! brings to the table (hasn't MS had plenty of time to prove this?) So instead of refocusing their vision to innovate they've opted to imitate, and sadly this course will garner Y! the same end result as countless other acquisitions (but will make a bigger headline when it happens.)
Start thinking about what the people want and not about the fat cats pocketbooks.
by keeping their share price high through an economic dip. People who are looking for a secure investment may be more likely to buy Microsoft because of all this hype. :-(
SCO's share price amply demonstrated that people don't need much motivation to buy
If Microsoft actually spend money on purchasing Yahoo, then they are doing their shareholders a dis-service, as you said.
Microsoft Labs has done some really great stuff. But you don't see it in their products. That's why I have a really hard time believing MS can -execute- what Bill Gates proposed.
If you look at MS's desktop products, in particular, you see a pattern of buying a good product and then as part of integrating it, making it more and more baroque and buggy and security-vulnerable.
Reminds me of the comment I read somewhere during the MS anti-trust debates: "If Microsoft is so keen on innovation, fine. The decision of the court should be that Microsoft is free to innovate using ONLY their internal resources, but is restricted from acquiring any technology from other sources. This enables the Market to work better, by allowing innovations to move freely." I had friends working on a start-up, when Microsoft announced a potential competitor piece of -vapor-ware-, their funding dried up immediately, and MS never did deliver the goods...
dave
It's not just you. The absurdities are piling on top of each other, like cockroaches in a cup.
Gates: "We have a strategy for competing in the search space that Google dominates today, that we'll pursue that we had before we made the Yahoo offer, and that we can pursue without that. It involves breakthrough engineering."
"... competing in the search space..." That's corporate-speak. Generally, when someone uses corporate-speak, you can expect that they are talking baloney.
"... breakthrough engineering..." When has Microsoft ever had "breakthrough engineering". If you know of an example, please mention it.
Maybe he means "broken engineering". Microsoft's engineering is so bad that one of the biggest and most respected IT magazines is rejecting their newest product: Save Windows XP. Quote: "More than 75,000 people have signed InfoWorld's "Save XP" petition in the three weeks since it was launched - many with passionate, often emotional pleas to not be forced to make a change."
Bill Gates is software's Dr. Death. If you are pro-life, sign the petition.
The "engineering" of Windows XP was so bad that Windows XP was an enormous hassle until Service Pack 2 was released, 3 years after Windows XP was introduced. Then we got only 3 years of use with less hassle (except for a very large number of software engineering bugs that created vulnerabilities), and now Gates wants to kill it.
Microsoft has proven, over many years, that it does not know how to run a search engine. Buying Yahoo will not magically make Microsoft smarter, especially since Yahoo has proven, over many years, that...
Bill Gates comment is interesting in that MS' purpose in acquiring Yahoo is primarily for Yahoo's technical people, and not for any particular technologies/IP held by Yahoo. That is, MS values Yahoo only for its technical people. In a sense MS is fighting a war against Google on two fronts: 1) the search engine business, and 2) attracting the sharpest technical people. MS is losing on both fronts. Instead of MS changing its corporate environment so as to again be attractive in recruiting sharp people, MS is simply trying to buy these people from other companies. It's sad really, and reflects the real problem with MS: its employee environment. Who wants to work for MS these days? (Just read Mini-Microsoft's blog for interesting insights into how MS has evolved -- it is a pretty brutal work environment that no longer sufficiently rewards those who excel.) It'd get real interesting if a significant number of Yahoo staff come out and publicly say they will move to other companies (e.g. Google) should MS buy out Yahoo. In fact, Google could get the word out essentially rolling out the red carpet for any Yahoo employee who decides to leave Yahoo should the MS takeover come to pass. Imagine if 1000 of the top Yahoo staff said "we will not work for MS." I can't think of a better "poison pill."
If you start having sex with 9 women right now the chances of you being a father in 9 months is much greater than if you only had sex with one.
Microsoft is unlikely to be so interested in Yahoo for the search capability, though that's a nice side benefit. The real prizes are yahoo webmail and yahoo messenger. Combine those two with hotmail and MSN messenger and you have about 75% of all webmail traffic and about 2/3s of all IM traffic.
Fussing about the combined entity's search percentage is just noise--the real new killer market shares would be in webmail and IM.
Remain calm! All is well!
Yahoo is a trusted name. I have had my yahoo email account since it was Rocketmail. They have Dating, IM, Domain Hosting, Jobs, and a host of other small stuff besides. Their Search engine is NOTHING SPECIAL. Expect it is integrated with the Yahoo site as a whole. It's a question of interconnectivity. Yahoo Maps does a few things better then Google Maps, it meshes nicely with their Yellow Pages site and I use it to find subway stations and bus routes, a choice of closest businesses etc. Microsoft wants to buy a turn key operation not hire a bunch of geeks.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
I'm not sure that search technology matters all that much. For the first half of 2007, Yahoo search was probably better than Google search. Yahoo had all those special cases (weather, celebrities, stocks, etc.) working before Google did. Yet Yahoo's market share barely moved.
What matters for profitability is the effectiveness of the advertising-delivery system. In that, Google is way ahead of Yahoo, MSN, and the little guys (Ask, Mahalo, Wikia, etc.) Yahoo top management knew this in 2006 but couldn't catch up.
If Microsoft has some great idea, it's probably on the ad side, not the search side. They control a browser, so they can put in something intrusive if they want.
"So, if you combine their work and our work, the speed at which you can innovate and get things done is just dramatically more rapid."
I'm really, really surprised to hear Gates say something like this. It's been my experience that the more resources you throw at a project, the less efficient and the more bogged down it becomes. I would have expected Gates to have found this to be empirically untrue, especially given the vast number of bloated & overdue projects Microsoft has had to deal with in the past.
Unless there's some feature in Project 2008 that I'm missing.
"Look, Smithers! I'm Davy Crockett!"
Bingo!
He's been perfectly clear all along, and for 20 years magazine writers have misunderstood him.
Damn - now we have the right word, the man comes across as focused!
results for: enervate
Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) - Cite This Source - Share This
enervate
-verb (used with object)
1. to deprive of force or strength; destroy the vigor of; weaken.
--Synonyms 1. enfeeble, debilitate, sap, exhaust.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
At which time "Yahoo!" would be renamed "Yawho?" (or would that be "Yawhom?").
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
So, Bill, what you're telling us is that you don't have enough cooks yet. You need yet another cook in the kitchen. Funny but I expect this will only drag down Yahoo to your level. You will have design by committees. You will have company infighting. Fools. This will not help them.
M$ doesn't need Yahoo. They want Yahoo.
I want to be retired when I grow up.
Would we then get AT&T Microsoft DSL? That would only run on Windows with IE?
I'm sure Microsoft is more interested in buying the customer/client base, both for Yahoo!'s web properties as well as advertising services, as well as eliminating a competitor in these areas so they can concentrate the fight on Google.
There may be some search expertise in Yahoo they can use, but really I doubt Microsoft is lacking in software talent, and I'm sure Microsoft research is more than up to the task of providing any necessary technology. The reason Microsoft is falling behind Google is surely because they are not so nimble (although I wonder how long Google can keep it up, if indeed they still are, given their crazy growth rate). Microsoft have become a giant slow moving behemoth, and apparently have horrible software management practices. The years of delay and scaled back feature set of Vista says it all. Adding masses more Yahoo! software engineers and managers to the mix is not the solution. Microsoft need to totally rethink the way they manage software projects - cut the burocracy and layers of management and inter-team back biting and get back to start-up type get-it-done environment.
IMO, the spin that this is about aquiring great technology is presumably because that sounds better than saying they're trying to remove a competitor and remove user choice - FORCINC people to become Microsoft customers.
At which time "Yahoo!" would be renamed "Yawho?" (or would that be "Yawhom?").
Depends on whether it's the subject or the object.
"Yawho is a search engine?
"He tried to search Yawhom?"
You don't get to be a global monopoly by making business decisions "because you can"...
M$ wants to cut off Google's oxygen supply -- paid search. If you view this deal through that lens it makes perfect sense.
Will Google be the first company in history to survive a microsoft attack? Maybe.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
How it happened. It's really all about the search volume.
1) Google innovated a better search experience
2) They used that to "leverage" AOL to take their Ads as well (forcing out Overture/Goto).
3) They used the revenue to buy additional search volume (including Yahoo's... if you remember).
4) The additional search volume generates additional revenue GOTO 3.
Frankly I suspect Microsoft's desire is to consolidate the remaining unpurchased search volume.
Yahoo's attempted to play catch up by upgrading the revenue optimization, but quite frankly,
this has failed as I predicted at the time - the optimization means little if you dont have
eyeballs or advertisers.
Revenue == Eyeballs x ClickThruRate x PPC
Google's revenue-based ordering is designed to improved CTR - not Eyeballs or PPC.
Eyeballs is increased by increasing places where you own the search box, and
PPC is increased by increasing Advertisers (which is a function of Eyeballs as it turns
out - advertisers go where its efficient to advertise). CTR is increased by good, relevant
ads on a serach (which is where Google scored better than GoTo/Overture).
Gates lost me as soon as he said "innovate". He's like a hot air corn popper, spewing buzzwords.
- thank heavens!
- the thought of drinking that delicious chocolate concoction would have been forever ruined.
By buying out Yahoo, M$ is buying their way into second place and they also get the engineers that will stay with them at the same salaries Yahoo was paying them. They also get all Yahoo code.
Yes it would be cheaper to entice the engineers to move over to M$, but then they still would have to work on the coding that M$ has and avoid putting any code Yahoo owns in it. They would still be behind both Google and Yahoo and would actually have to work to raise their market share.
Buying out Yahoo increases their market share, provides them with good engineers (at least the ones that stay), and they get to use good code.
Shitgrains.
Shit fur long.
etc...
I think that is such a false statement.
Clearly they want Yahoo's income stream so they can claim a higher % of revenue from "the net"
They also want the customers in part because of Web 2.0 social networking, they think they can earn more from having more users... my guess is hotmail + yahoo mail must equal a good % of all internet users, even assuming some users have more than one account...
Forgetting that Microsoft tried to kill the Internet w/ the Windows 95 product (before it was released; by the time of it's release it was a pro internet product), what Microsoft products in the 1st or Nth version are actually innovative?
They have had a cell phone platform for years (Windows Mobile) so why is the iPhone so much better? Generating so much excitement? IF they are truly the market leader in innovation and have had a long head start, why isn't their phone product better?
They don't build great products, they build products that can sell well, and with which they can lock-in users.
http://www.hawknest.com/
Simple question for Billy: if you do buy Yahoo, are you going to continue using its technology platform, like FreeBSDs etc, or are you gonna kill all that and try to replace it with your stuff? How much Yahoo's value are you ready to burn in the process?
From the summary, "So, if you combine their work and our work, the speed at which you can innovate and get things done is just dramatically more rapid
Isn't the first rule of project management that, beyond a certain point, this doesn't work? Throwing more people on a project just makes it harder to coordinate and convolutes the process (see Vista). I mean, it's not like MS or Yahoo is hurting for resources or personnel, are they really going to get leaner and faster by merging?
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Something to the effect that having the 2nd and 3rd competitors to MicroSoft merge was equivalent to tying their legs together in a race. In the old days, MS loved to have its competitors merge, as it guaranteed they could never win.
Very few mergers of any kind work out well: corporate cultures have much stronger effects than anyone imagines.
Has MS 'won' in any of its acquisitions, in any way but having eliminated competition?
"The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."
This just goes to show the world how PATHETIC and UNIMAGINATIVE msoft really is. BILLIONS of dollars, and they can't HIRE or entice internal imagination? That ALONE should send their stock or market cap tumbling 1000%.
NO investors should have pity on a company that is SOOO desperate as this one. Innovation my ass.
So, WHEN is ENOUGH ENOUGH, gates?
A true measure of a company's worthiness is not by what it can amass through acquisition, corruption, and corporate slaying, but by what it can create and grow via ingenuity.
Maybe it IS time for ms to perish, make room for others to breathe and then expand without the fear of an msoft around.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
...ROTFLMAO!
Yeh, we wouldn't want to end up (hint hint) with shitty systems called:
- PetaShit
- MetaShit
- HeptShit
- CentiShit
Talk about adopting shitty core values...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
MS is constantly trying to copycat, rather than innovate.
They better learn soon, that we dont want microsoft products that are just bought out products from other companies...
They better learn that we dont want iPod clones.... we want new ideas, better software, more freedom...
We dont want google clones from microsoft.... We dont want an MS owned Yahoo. Yahoo is just fine as is...
So what will you do Microsoft? Will you continue to buy properties rather than create them? Will you continue this silly fat cat mentality where you chase innovative mice with wads of cash, or will you finally do you're own thing as a company?
We know there are talented coders at MS... How about we let them do their thing. Let these guys innovate rather than copy others.
We dont need MS Live. We Dont need Passport... You failed. Focus on the OS, focus on the software... Rethink and reinvent yourself... because you look like a company with no clue, incapable of doing anything other than failing miserably at everything as of late.
Hell you cant even code a f'n quality media player or graphics viewer. Vista is a mess... Everyone avoids MSNBC, LIVE, MSN...
Get this... Your control schemes are not appealing and we're not biting. Switch it up, appeal to people and stop trying to screw the users.
Google's biggest competitors likely to exhaust themselves in this protracted battle. Wonder who the winner is? Now, if just Google sticks to that Orwelian "Do No Evil" slogan for ever then we're good.
The underlining deal is the Yahoo assets in Asian, namely Yahoo! Japan and Alibaba in China. Microsoft cannot grow anymore with its software products since they already have the largest share of the market in the United States and Europe. Google has the competitive edge in the online market so Microsoft can only compete here in the western world, but the can't dominate online.
Yahoo! Japan and Alibaba is a goldmine opportunity to online markets in Asia and by default deployment of more Microsoft products and services. Remember there are 1.5 billion people in China. With the rapid growth of the Chinese economy it's going to be a bonanza for whoever grabs the lion's share of the online marketplace.
Translation: "Please don't quit."
So some day we'll all be working for Microyoogle?
programming myself into obsolescence
So, is it just me or does it sound strangely like Bill Gates is saying that a large pool of talented people working together makes a better product, faster... sort of like a certain software approach we all love...
Bill Gates learned every dirty trick he knows from IBM - though he was a precocious student, and learned fast.
The thing is, while BG may have learned everything he knows from IBM, IBM didn't teach BG everything IBM knows!
Paranoia is a Survival Trait!
Since when has MS ever done any "breakthrough engineering"?
For those who don't want to RTFA, here is the gist: The richest man on the Earth said: I want more money!
"Hi, I am Clippy, Your personal search assistent. It looks like You are looking for porn, would You like a hand?"
" No thanks Clippy, I'll use my own hand..."
Don't forget GigaShit,which was also the internal name for Vista,and the reason they are looking to buy Yahoo now. :)
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I am kind of interested to see what Microsoft will do if they do buy them out. All the 'technology' that Yahoo has is on close to 20,000+ servers, most of witch running copy's of RedHat and FreeBSD. Are going to change ALL the systems to a copy of 2008 or look like an idiot that their OS can't keep up?
Really reminds me of when 3dfx, flush with cash, bought out STB. Having no experience in the OEM market, then losing all its STB oem clients and running both company's to the ground with reorganizations. We can only hope:P
Remember how in the Empire Strikes Back the Millennium Falcon managed to get two Star Destroyers to collide?
Remember how much faster the "merged" ships were then able to go after the Falcon? After all they had one ship and two sets of engines (pointing the opposite way from each other even).
Yeah, it's kind of like that.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you're competition focussed, and not customer focussed, then don't expect your business to grow. MS has a lot of momentum, so it won't die overnight.
They've puled the Vista SP1 and that's not getting much of Ballmer's energy. Nope he's off buying Danger and trying for Yahoo to try make a fight with Google.
Google must be pissing themselves. Both Yahoo and MS are sinking in service space and there is no reason to think that they will be more productive together than as they currently are, while Google is growing.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Bill Gates has never said anything but a lie in his life.
Microsoft does not sell software - it sells lies.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
You miss the quite obivious brilliance ( Mod Parent +1 ):
If they ported Vista to the XBox 360, and made it exclusive...
...when you got a shitload of geeks writing to a discussion board..
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne
Unless they are running it on all those Sun boxes.
to me, this Yahoo Microsoft deal just says how bad Steve Ballmer's judgment has been as CEO of Microsoft.
First he let Vista development get out of hand, which would have resulted in his ouster at some companies, and now this. From what I hear, his main contribution to Microsoft has been longer meetings.
The truth is that Bill Gates was a much better CEO in terms of business strategy. Some people are still *angry* about some of those business strategies, but there's no denying that they *worked*.
I've got to think that Bill Gates is merely toeing the company line at this point, acting like the Microsoft Yahoo merger will be successful. My guess is Bill isn't in a position to change Microsoft policy anymore.
I'm hoping that at some point the Microsoft board will throw out Ballmer. My sense is that he's surrounded by yes men, who won't tell him how stupid these ideas are, so it might even be a good idea to bring in an outsider at this point to run Microsoft.
What shareholders would really like to see is more effort on Microsoft's bread and butter, Windows and Office, which accounts for almost all of Microsoft's profit. A CEO who lets the core business fall apart while focusing on a futile effort to expand into a market that's already been taken over by Google should not be left in charge of the company.
One of the richest companies in the world can't build their own system to compete with Google. And they think buying one of Google's competitors (whom Google is beating) is going to help?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
2 Loosers getting together does not make a winner! Maybe able to give a good fight if the 2 cultures didnt differ so drastically!!!
Bigger monopolies do not contribute to innovation. Bill is just saying what is required to get the merger approved by the government. It must "benefit the consumer".
If bigger monopolies innovated faster, then Microsoft would be in the stratosphere. yet they're in an abyss.
To say Yahoo has a lot of great engineers must be very humbling to yahoo, but *drum roll* so does microsoft. I am guessing they have them cuffed to radiators.
After that, they hit hard on designing good algorithms, and hired the mathematical talent to do
That's simply false, the PageRank idea and implementation came first, it was always there, and was developed by Page and Brin before they "hired the mathematical talent" to develop it and in fact even before Google was Google. It was the very starting point of it all. The single-biggest attraction point of Google was the relevancy of its search results. I know, I remember those days of sifting through pages and pages of arb e.g. AltaVista results, and what a difference it was when Google came along. From Wikipedia:
"PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page (hence the name Page-Rank[3]) and later Sergey Brin as part of a research project about a new kind of search engine. The project started in 1995 and led to a functional prototype, named Google, in 1998. Shortly after, Page and Brin founded Google Inc."
I am example of that. Whenever I am left to do my work I get as much done as I possibly humanly can. Then they assign a new person from a low cost location (hello there chaps in Mumbai) and management believes that will increase productivity.
What happens in reality is that I have to spend most of the time explaining to people how to do things, thus I actually don't have time to do the stuff myself. We get less things done. And when the chaps in low cost locations get good enough to do things on their own, they leave for a company that actually pays them better (they may move where I live: welcome to the UK!).
My firm fails to see that by paying the correct salary to another person they would avoid the eternal retraining of new people, and there would eventually be an increase of productivity (because the new, properly remunerated hiree would not feel such an strong urge to change jobs).
You will never convince the peanut counters and some CEOs and Chief Software Architects that IT work is not like building walls or trinkets.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If they would try the same I would leave immediately.
If they want to blkanize the Web that is fine by me, I just simply would move the other side of their border....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Microsoft owns most of Facebook and Hotmail. If they had Yahoo E-mail as well then they would have far too much personal informations about people. I dont like it that companies like Google and Microssoft can just buy out the internet and I dont think it's good that any company should have access to that amount of personal information.
I haven't tried YAHOO! for a search since Google came out, but IIRC YAHOO! nearly always returned mostly irrelevant leads for me. Google has nearly always had a hit near or on top of the first page, first try for me. (Botanical research mostly, YMMV.) Bill is welcome to have it, IMO, It goes well with the feature creature that is Windows.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.