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Microsoft and News Corp in Yahoo Bid Talks
KingAlanI writes "The New York Times website is reporting that Microsoft is trying another angle in its bid for Yahoo: joining up with another behemoth, Murdoch's News Corporation.
This is still very much in the preliminary stage, if anything, but an important development to consider. The idea of Yahoo working with fellow Web giant Google, in a plan to counteract Microsoft's takeover plan, is also discussed."
Why do I have a feeling MSFT is going to come out ahead with this deal
As for if this will stand in the EU... that is another question all-together.
-nick
If Microsoft is trying to convince anyone that its hostile takeover of Yahoo isn't evil, it's going in exactly the wrong direction.
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make install -not war
All in all, the goal seems to be to strengthen Yahoo in order to push up the stock price to avoid a hostile takeover. The poison pill approach is to make the company look so bad that nobody would want to buy it. I don't think that's what Yahoo's trying to do at all.
My blog
Yes, it's how psychopaths operate. The reality is that Microsoft can't even service their OS monopoly with a competitive product, watching them try to play in every single market is both amusing and frustrating. But let's not chastise them for it, the arrogance is already undoing them from the inside-out.
True I don't have much sympathy but ad hominem is still a logically flawed argument.
What MS says is logically true, I just don't happen to give a rats ass about them saying it.
Money is the root of all evil?
The recent announcement about Yahoo testing Adsense for search result advertising just proves that MS is right and that Yahoo is not a viable standalone entity. We need strong and serious competition for Google because the last thing the world needs is a monopoly on the source of revenue for ad properties. Yahoo has now admitted defeat and MS is willing to put up the challenge. Throw in Fox and we could have a real competitor for Google.
Of course, combining 3 "also rans"doesn't mean we get a winner, just that we'll at least likely have a fight!
True enough, but, y'know, why spend all this money on lawyers just to make this thing happen just to have a bit of a limp struggle against the google-constrictor. What's the point? The three of them are screwed as an entity. They could no more pull a decent web presence out of this than I could pull a flaming, banjo-playing clown out of my ass.
Anyway, google as a monopoly for a few years sounds quite nice. I like monopolies. Aren't monopolies what gave us all that stuff that isn't MS, that has allowed MS to degenerate quietly into the laughable junk it is, you know, things like Linux, and google?
You may not agree with what I say, but you should fight to the death to allow me to say it, by modding me up.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I'm not sure we'll be hearing "Yahoo! It" or "MSN It" any time soon.
It probably doesn't help that Google is the default search in Firefox either. There's probably some quote out there along the lines of much is forgiven of those who can deliver. People forgive Apple the smeck-headed egotism of Jobs and the acolytes because they still manage to deliver a solid product. People are worried about Google actually being evil but they turn out some really innovative products just dripping with ideas. Microsoft takes a lot of shit for being evil and the products they come out with are dull and uninspired.
You can talk about propaganda and public relations and brainwashing when people say they have warm-fuzzies when thinking about Apple and Google. At the end of the day, though, people have to use their products. You can say it's marketing but a lot of people really, really like Apple and Google products. They can't all be kool-aid drinkers. If Jobs acts like an insufferable twat with the overbearing egotism of someone who thinks he's always right, well damnit, he usually is. We probably wouldn't dislike him as much if he turned out a Vista every once in a while. The Mac Cube was lame but not lame enough.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
"Here are up-to-date numbers for a single country, Turkey:"
Those statistics being "single country" also makes them less valid on the world scale.
I thought I smelled a fish when your statistics seemed to indicate that 1/3 of all Turks are "MSN users". This also means that if this and this is correct, there are more MSN users than Internet users in Turkey. So let us just assume that EVERY single Internet user in Turkey is also an MSN user.
Could this possibly be representative for the world?
The answer is pretty obviously "no".
If all your statistics are correct, Turkey accounts for approximately 8.3 % of the MSN users in the world, but less than 1.3% of the worlds internet users (based on 1.32 billion Internet users from here).
Either your numbers are completely wrong, or MSN is over 6 times as popular in Turkey as the average for Internet users. Either way, they are completely useless as proof of total MSN usage in the world.
I think the only thing that would happen is MS would have to pay another fine like in US/EU and everything would be business as usual.
My penguin ate my sig
As long as its a term for your product or service, you are fine. When it enters popular usage as a generic term for products or services in your market (as happened with Xerox and Kleenex), you're screwed. While Google is often used as a verb for running internet searches, its not really clear to me that its used in a brand-generic sense (as "search on the internet") rather than a brand-specific but engine-generic sense (as "search on the applicable Google service"). Lots of people I know use "Google" as a verb, but they all use Google search engines as, if not their only, their primary engines for "generic" searches, so when they say "Google it" or "I Googled it", they really mean "search(ed) on Google", not "search(ed) on the internet".