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Gates Explains Microsoft's Need for Yahoo

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the let-me-explan-my-need-for-a-fresh-cup-of-coffee dept.

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.""

6 of 271 comments (clear)

  1. Translation by rucs_hack · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "Without Yahoo, we are years behind, and likely to stay that way"

    Am I right or am I right?

  2. Re:Breakthrough Engineering? by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Microsoft's approach to breakthrough engineering is through acquisitions? Is it just me or do I sense an oxymoron here... Yes. Just like "innovated" PowerPoint and they "innovated" MS-DOS, etc. Bill Gates thinks "innovate" == "acquire through any means necessary".
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  3. Boil it down by Wannabe+Code+Monkey · · Score: 4, Interesting

    better portal for a very broad set of customers

    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.

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  4. No Zimbra??? by jkrise · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

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  5. Why Microsoft REALLY wants Yahoo by mlwmohawk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:Brute force and ignorance by naoursla · · Score: 4, Interesting

    But Google was first to the search market with effective statistical natural language processing techniques.