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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.""
Is that grammar or spulling? But at any rate he needs to meet Bob. Sadly, so do a lot of other slashdotters.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Because in California, Non-Competes have no legal value.
That said, I agree 100% with the notion that this is MS' Waterloo. They have effectively stated that they can not, even with owning the OS and web browser, use people's web habits and make money from that.
Perhaps a bunch of Silicon Valley types should buy some MS shares and start a proxy war over where MS is headed (demand that MS pay out their war chest for example)?
Just a RND thought.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
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."
Microsoft does not innovate they acquire, they always have. When IBM approached Bill Gates for an operating system they thought he had, when he only had a basic interpreter, he went out and bought Rdos a CPM clone, and used it to make PCdos. They bought Hot Mail. And here is some more: http://www.microsoft.com/msft/acquisitions/history.mspx
Many a long talk since then I have had with the man in the moon; he had my confidence on the voyage. Joshua Slocum
I think that Bill G. and Steve B. are annoyed that MS's shares haven't moved much since 2000. MS is still a safe investment, but their stocks seems stuck and not growing much.
Goodbye Slashdot. You've changed.
Second, was a design decision: That search results would contain every word you typed. No more of this +term nonsense. This made things very simple for users who don't care to learn a search-term language.
The result: happy users.
After that, they hit hard on designing good algorithms, and hired the mathematical talent to do it. Nobody else treated search with so much science. This made users even more happy. Google had the most relevant results.
So - Google won because, from the common end user's perspective, they had a superior product. Period. That plays right into the GP's argument. Superior product = more customers = more ad revenue = the first
Mir tut es leid, Menschen daß Einfältigfehlersuchenbaumfolgendenaffen sind.
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.