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Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo Takeover Offer
mksmac writes "According to the KOMO TV Website, Microsoft has withdrawn its bid for Yahoo after presenting them with an increased offer that was subsequently declined by Yahoo. Frankly, this seems like a smarter decision on Microsoft's part, but I'd like to hear how other people feel about the deal. Should Microsoft have walked away, pressured Yahoo via a hostile takeover or sweetened the pot until Yahoo gave in?" For those who prefer it, the NYT also has coverage, and the story is also at news.com, among many others. I like the Beeb's version as well. And for the Microsoft-centric explanation of why the courtship is over, see Steve Balmer's letter to Jerry Yang.
This doesn't seem to have been a particularly well-handled, or deeply-sincere, attempt by Microsoft... so what were they really doing?
This is a sincere question; I've seen a lot of acquisitions (and even hostile takeovers) happen, and this seemed lacking in many ways. Maybe I've missed some of the machinations; maybe not.
On one hand, I'm of course happy I can stay with Flickr. On the other, it would have been a great deal of fun seeing Microsoft get bogged down and distracted for a good few years as it struggled to digest Yahoo (and, likely, killing any value of that company in the process).
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Bad day to be a Yahoo employee, bad year really...
Yahoo's got to the point where not even MS wants them. They're doomed. That's not really a bad thing. Yahoo is evil after all.
AOL called, they want their business plan back.
...don't let the damn door hit your ass on the way out!
The Mothership
Competitive Value of Yahoo! Demolished!
Ballmer creates AOL Redux.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
After Google and Yahoo announced their advertising "experiment", i'm sure that was what killed it for Microsoft, i'm sure a few chairs were sent across meeting rooms in Redmond too.
This was never about Microsoft really wanting to buy Yahoo!. Based on everything we've seen, I think it's safe to assume that this was all about disturbing Yahoo!'s shit, at a time when, for Yahoo!'s sake, such shit disturbery needed to be avoided at all cost.
Now Yahoo!'s shareholders are up in arms. The faith in the executives has been damaged. Microsoft is still as strong as ever, but now Yahoo! has a cloud of uncertainty hanging over it. In a way, Microsoft has made Yahoo! look like a small player by just making the offer, showing that Microsoft could devour Yahoo!.
So why do we care that this MIcrosoft was bidding on Yahoo? IIRC, the big story was Microsoft bidding on Yahoo!... Of course, I'm surprised we didn't hear about Microsoft's competing bid for Yahoo, but I suppose that the obscurity of the latter could very well be the reason for that.
Yyyyyyeeeeeeaaaaaahhhhhh!!!!!!
Sig this!
I think it was very silly for Yahoo to ask for so much money, and to tell all their employees they would load them up with all kinds of bonuses if Microsoft took over. Bad for the shareholders. Basically Yang and the crew have their money and just don't want to admit they lost. They're done, and they're willing to destroy the company rather than admit Microsoft just won.
Yahoo will simply go out of business.
Resistance is futile. EPIC awaits. Today Yahoo, tomorrow Amazon.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
This doesn't seem to have been a particularly well-handled, or deeply-sincere, attempt by Microsoft... so what were they really doing?
I don't know, but am I the only thinking Microsoft lost credibility in the process? Am I just not understanding what this was all about?I'm happy because it means more competition, but I admit I'm also somewhat confused as you are about what they are really doing...
Maybe it really is about some high-level finance strategy that only people in the know can grasp?
Animoog.org
Yahoo's market cap takes a hit, shareholders initiate lawsuits against the Yahoo board. Microsoft may be able to swoop in next quarter and accomplish this via hostile takeover for significantly less. Surprised Microsoft didn't do this sooner
*claps*
Yahoooooo
Yahooooo
Yahooooo
Yahooooo
Oh wait.. never mind..
Developers
Developers
Developers
As much as I love to see MS waste vast quantities of money, I'd rather they did it building ridiculous computer operating systems for incomprehensible budgets, and not dragging down companies with some value with them.
On a side note, I wonder how much it cost Apple to build OS X?
expandfairuse.org
Did I just find a typo that wasn't there?
Microsoft's side: Smart move. Ballmer's letter lays out good reasons.
If I'm a Yahoo employee, I might breath a sigh of relief. Acquisitions mostly end up with layoffs.
However, overall this isn't too comforting. With Google's share price far off $700 and the credit/housing/employment crunch, I'd say Yahoo might have gotten a good price for itself at $33. If trends continue, the stock may plummet - which may leave Yahoo in a financial problem.
No winner.
and watch Yahoo's stock plummet
[i]Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo! undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft.[/i]Confirmation that throwing the G-word in front of Ballmer drives him out of any deal [i]clearly a deal is not meant to be[/i] - that could well be Microsoft's sig.
Mmmm... Flash.
You know if Microsoft had all of that money and stock set aside ($1.5 billion just for employee retention) and didn't buy Yahoo!, they are going to buy someone else. AOL makes sense and the price is right, as Time Warner wants nothing to do with them.
"I'm not crazy 'cause I take the right pills everyday"
It wouldn't have been the first advertising company they've bought.
It amazes me that that's the sort of thing they're thinking about aquiring rather than developing in-house. They have a decent search platform already.
Honestly, do you possibly think you could recover that much money with goods from Yahoo? This crazy idea to buy Yahoo was a combination of two things: ignoramus upper management and pressure from Google. Too many businessmen only understand how to make money from advertising. Who put them in charge? You need to weed them out and put in upper management that understand the beauties in your software that is currently making you money. Let Google make the money in the internet. Quit worrying about them or your silly MSN or other sundry internet ventures.
Instead, you should invest that money in your operating system, the APIs for your OS, the tools to make it easy to create applications for your OS. Make a serious real time OS. Unify your OSs. Architect them so that you can crank them out faster and safer. Make your driver model easy to understand and code for. DirectX seems to do good for you, but you had better keep up on it. The same is true of C#. Give these Java folks some stiff competition in language, libraries, and tools. Make the speed of your CLR rock. Make it vectorize, use the SIMD, automatically use multiple cores, etc.
In summary, make businesses want to run on your platform, develop for your platform. You want every office to use your software tools. It won't matter if every office uses your search engine when they go to get info off the internet. That's not the most effective way for you -- a company with an already vast installation base -- to make money.
Yahoo has a lot of great things inside of it. However, they got about 7 billion a year in revenues and a net income of around 600-700 million. Microsoft pulls about double that for margin.
I think Microsoft just basically screwed yahoo for this round. After all the expenses they added. It's going to take them a while before they can come out ahead on this.
I predict layoffs.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080215_004309.html This thing went on too long to be credible. I don't respect MSFT, but don't for a minute think that its management is as incompetent as it would have to be to buy a company that has so little to offer in the larger scope of things. This has been a great way to make MSFT look powerful, and YHOO look like a weak patsy - which is exactly what YHOO is.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
... that in years from now yahoo will take over microsoft.
Now my Yahoo email accounts are no longer in danger of being turned into "Yahoo Express 2.0 Live!". MSFT really sucks at anything "webcentric" and I'm sure they would have turned Yahoo Mail into some bloated ad drowned monstrosity that would only work in Windows. But that is my 02c,YMMV.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I personally am kind of sad that Microsoft didn't buy Yahoo. I had a kind of deja vue about the whole thing which I couldn't place, and it only occured to me yesterday: Time-AOL.
When AOL was so bloated with cash they didn't know what to do with it, they bought time. It was a marriage made in hell. Time didn't have anything that AOL needed and AOL couldn't offer Time anything. When the dot bomb crash happened, AOL lost value quickly to eventually become the struggling company today that only exists because of a legacy of users who never switched to better offers.
I had the kind of feeling that that would have happened to Microsoft as well had they bought Yahoo. They would have parted with almost half their operating capital for something that would have given them nothing. Given the fact that Microsoft is not exactly rapidly gaining marketshare at the moment, it could have hurt them badly.
'should microsoft have walked away, threatened to force himself on her, or offered her more money'
what the f do you think? corporations already get treated like people in certain areas of law.. and yet somehow when they act like this, nobody calls them a bunch of deranged, anti social, psychotic freakjobs.
I was hoping to watch this happen, a terrible union, like a boa choosing prey that is just too large. Once it's got it mouth around the head, it's too late to back out, but too big to swallow, usually leading to unfortunate results for both parties.
But instead I'll watch these great beasts, thrashing about, slowly starving due to tiny nocturnal mammals who are consuming all the plants at the base of the food chain. The dinos can perhaps catch and snap some of these little beasts up, but the energy expenditure is too large, for such a tiny meal, and they are very fast, hard to see, and adaptable. Indeed, some have adapted to gnawing away at the monsters feet and tail, and running away with a full stomach before the nerve signals have even reached the brain.
In this situation (evolution has rendered your niche uninhabitable) cannibalism starts to look like a good idea. But it is, obviously, a short term solution.
This is NOT a signature.
Microsoft dint want to buy Yahoo! in the first place ..mayb. As usual, they kept themselves n the news , which they had always wanted. If their efforts were really really directed, no matter what , they wuda pressed Yahoo!, especially, after telling that they will go to the shareholders directly.Now suddenly what had happened ?? You think Yang blocked the chair throw ??
Microsoft is very interested in providing choice to customers, even if it requires buying out the competition.
Can't you see how sincere he is? It's all about choice! That's why Yahoo! was supposed to sell to Microsoft. Choice!
But wait - what if Yahoo! were to ally with, well, other search providers?
That would be bad. See, Microsoft buying Yahoo! means giving people more choices. Yahoo! doing business with Google means reducing choice.
That's why it is crucially important that Yahoo! picks the right megacorp to associate with. Think happy puppies. Think Microsoft.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Does anyone know if Jerry Yang sent a reply? If so is there a copy floating around on the net somewhere?
It might be just be me, but Balmer came across as quite pompous and patronizing in his letter. It would be interesting to see how Jerry took it.
ACK NAK RST
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
And a million (give or take) flickr users breathed a sigh of relief (and of course narcissistically photographed themselves breathing that sigh of relief).
Oh no, my Karma just got run over by my dogma..
All things aside it just shows you Karma can screw one over when least want it to.
Secondly, a cynic (such as myself) might suspect Microsoft pulled out of what most speculators considered a done deal in order to massively deflate Yahoo's value so it could be bought later at a fraction of the price. Not that Yahoo has done itself any favours in this process by effectively stoking up the speculation and failing to add much value to its service. I use Yahoo's email service because its cheap, not because its any good, and the "new, improved" web mail service is infinitely heavier, slower and less reliable.
Alternatively, a cynic might argue that no deal was ever really intended, that there was some intent by Microsoft to damage rivals rather than improve their own services. It wouldn't be the first time, if that was the case, but I'm not seeing any real damage beyond perhaps shareholder confidence.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Yeah - good thing they pulled out in time. Otherwise, they would have to support Yahoo for at least 17-18 years.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
Wait, that might have very well been MS' ulterior motive. Acquire a whole shipload of BSD "developers, developers, developers, developers" that could help them get out of the corner they have painted themselves into with the current state of Windows. Windows 7 might be basically Mac OS X Redmond style...a Microsoft GUI on top of BSD internals they can fork proprietary. That is the best explanation of any I have heard for why Yahoo was a MS target. Without Yahoo developers they can raid, this might be a more difficult task.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Hello, it's the misheard phrase police! We would like to inform you that the actual phrase is "fell swoop". Foul kind of works too though. At least you didn't say fowl. That would have been too much.
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=fell has the adjective meaning at the bottom.
which is totally what she said
'cause it's share price rose $1.86 (about 7%) over the news:
--- http://finance.google.com/finance?q=yhoo
Can't have pissed off too many shareholders...
To see Microsoft for once making the right choice. That's sad. The brain of the beast is not yet completely dead.
That means quite more suffering for the rest of us.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It'll be funny to see what happens to Yahoo's share price on Monday morning. A number of their bigger shareholders purchased additional shares after Microsoft's initial offer because they expected a deal. Now some of their biggest shareholders are caught holding the bag because of the arrogance of Yahoo management. Ouch.
Oh, and if Microsoft never acquires Yahoo, MSFT will have succeeded in creating division amongst Yahoo investors, management, and employees, thereby weakening the number two search competitor.
Let's hope I am wrong, because Microsoft is a dangerous company, and needs to be held at bay.
Sorry, but both will be down - Yahoo for the reasons stated, Microsoft because they will be seen more widely as no longer being closers for big deals. If you can't close mergers, what else can't you close...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think the majority was willing to give Ballmer a chance on this deal and prove himself...of course there were vocal critics who were against it all along....but overall he did a good job standing his ground and when push came to shove didn't get suckered into overpaying. Unfortunately, Yang freaked out and really blew his chance to be a statesman and make the big deal. End result: Yahoo! will tank big time and retreat into oblivion. And I for one am glad that Microsoft still has it!
Granted that Microsoft could (hamhandedly) internally
snuff BSD for their own use. Fortunately, because of the
license, anyone can absorb the strong points of BSD
for whatever they are worth.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Apple is using BSD to
eat Microsoft's lunch.
i hope Google and Yahoo! DO something truly frackin' painful to mshaft: create a network of Linux and web services and products to blunt msoft forays. Google needs to bundle Sketchup pro and other apps with Linux an Yahoo! users. Laptops. PDAs, cell phones and Walmart as tools and platformr could be what it takes to gut msoft.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Yahoo has places to go and ways to grow. They might tank, but that depends on how smart they are.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has Vista hanging around its neck like the proverbial albatross, and Windows 7 is looking a lot like some glorified version of shareware that I'm going to start calling "Rentware" whenever anybody asks me to describe it.
Yes, Microsoft owns the world right now. But they've pissed a lot more people off world-wide than Yahoo has with its "Send A Dissident To Camp" policy (ratting out Chinese patriots to the corrupt pack of mass murderers currently infesting Beijing). And don't forget Microsoft has kissed its share of fascist ass, too.
Yahoo was right to tell Microsoft to put serious coin on the table or fold.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
OS X is based on FreeBSD, an open-source product which has been developing since 1960's. FreeBSD itself also had lawsuits for using source code from UNIX.
Apple simply adds a GUI for Freebsd, nothing special.
Regarding original popular operating systems, there are only two: UNIX and Windows. All others, linux/bsd/etc. are just variations.
Yahoo! may have problems, but being taken over by Microsoft would have made things worse. Yahoo still has a lot of market share. I think their problem is that offerings like 360deg were confusing and bloated. They were trying to out-do Google by integrating too much stuff and the result was a mess. But many of their individual offerings (mail, games, chat, messenger, Flickr, delicious, etc.) are good and popular, and they can build on that. With Yahoo! move to OpenSocial and their new web platform, I think they have a good chance of gaining back a lot of what they have lost.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has a real problem: they just can't get it together in the Internet world. Their OS has allowed them to drag a lot of people to Live and MSN and they have inherited a lot of users with Hotmail, but I can't think of a single big Web thing where Microsoft is the leader.
Imagine a start-up that couldn't develop a me-too service despite having $30 billion in the bank...
He is way behind with MBS and needs to aquire more and converge into a better product they have now and expand that area.
Actually I believe that MSFT wanted yahoo ...
.. well, do I need to spell it out?
Nothing personal, mate, but I really do wish people would reconsider referring to a corporation, in a general discussion, by its stock exchange ticker symbol.
What is this? News for Financial Market Junkies?
I believe the company's legal name is Microsoft Corporation. That would be "Microsoft" for those inclined to save a few keystrokes, "microsoft" or "ms" for those preferring speed over clarity and reader comprehension, or variations on "Micro$oft" for those inclined to sophomoric humour. Hell, even The Evil Whose Name Shall Not be Spoken would work. But using an indirect reference when a direct one would be more meaningful
If you make your living trading securities one might be inclined to overlook it as a professional gaffe, but until I read something along the lines of MSFT wanted YHOO but were afraid of GOOG and threats from NOVL and RHT., the absence of consistency leaves me wondering WTF the context of the discussion is, and WTF the writer is really trying to say. If anything.
Yahoo was an extremely odd fit for Microsoft (different software platform, different development philosophy, extremely different corporate culture). Had the takeover gone through, they would have been stuck either a) supporting two different software environments or b) migrating Yahoo properties to MSN. Either course would be a distraction.
I think someone finally talked some sense into Ballmer & Co. about why Microsoft is better on its own than trying to get "Web 2.0" sense via acquisition.
Well you obviously didn't know until he told you, fucktard.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
*whoosh*
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
Yahoo is evil. Microsoft is evil. The only aspect of this issue I really care about, is that if MS bought out Yahoo, I'd have to step up my schedule to delete all my Yahoo accounts and otherwise completely divorce myself from any association from Yahoo. :p
Below is the text of the letter from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang. May 3, 2008
Mr. Jerry Yang
CEO and Chief Yahoo
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
Dear Jerry:
I'm going to fucking kill google!
[attachment: executive.chair]
Balmer did nothing wrong - why do I say? He screwed with one of his ad competitors (yahoo) made them look like dog sh*t; smoked out Google and finally nothing like getting the troops at msft at least moving again..they have been lame competitors since the DOJ bullshit... Balmer had nothing to lose and a ton to gain on the competitive strategy side..finally good to see Yahoo get competitive or at least hitting the proverbial gym.. This was doomed from day 1 http://techwatch.reviewk.com/
Now it's time for Yahoo to articulate a clear and ambitious Internet strategy. In my opinion they are aiming too many targets: they still look like an old fashioned content aggregator portal, they are trying to catch the so called web 2.0 user generated content wave and at the same time trying to monetize a search engine based ad insertion engine. They will obviously fail if they don't steer their ship to well defined objective.
MSN - loses about $1B net loss on $2.2B in ad revenue (operating expense are around $3 billion / year) Yahoo - makes about $600M net profit on $7B in revenue (ads, sales, etc). Net result a combined Yahoo + MSN would still be losing money unless Microsoft fires a significant portion of the Yahoo/MSN staff and cuts their MSN R&D spending. In either event, Yahoo as a company is better off NOT tying that particular anchor around its neck. Looking at the investment arena, Microsoft's share price has been hovering in the $25-30 / share range for the past 5 years... MSN represents such a small portion of the overall revenue it hardly impacts this value.... A combined MSN+Yahoo, would be not terribly compelling performance wise, and wouldn't change this fact. Any Yahoo shareholder who's share price was below water at the Microsoft bid, would still be underwater and remain that way. Hint most YHOO shareholders are currently underwater in this market. A rational investor would look at this offer and see 2 things: 1. YAHOO is profitable and still growing especially internationally, with 7B in revenue 2. Microsoft has no other company it could buy to increase it marketshare by 300% The conclusion to make is simple, refuse any acquisition offer short of 10x revenue. Look at Google w/ Double click. 3.1B acquisition for a company making 300M in revenue. Yahoo's management would be remiss in their duties to take any offer less than $48/share, ($70B evaluation) Yang is right to shoot MS down over $31/33 per share. The magic number is $48/share, which would put it well over Yahoo's 5 year high.
No. Re-read the offer. MS was seriously undervaluing Yahoo. More than half of the 'offer' was funny money, aka shares which MS basically prints on demand. MS is just backing of while it figures out how to undermine Yahoo's board in a way that won't get so much daylight or opposition.
The Yahoo board acted correctly. The shareholders are technically partial owners of the company. As such, their task is to do what's best for the company. Note that does not mean 'sell out' when an arbitrary offer is made.
Everyone knows the deal would be bad for Yahoo, and no one acting as an owner would chose a sloppy death for their company, products, and services.
Hey, it seems your panties are in a bit of a TWST, using abbreviations isn't the end of the WRLD.
What is is all that is. Isn't that obvious?
There seems to be a big assumption that good CEOs, especially good Tech CEOs, are easy to come by. They aren't. Yang just stepped in less than a year ago at Yahoo after Semel's abruptly quit. Ballmer has been CEO since 2000, and last time I checked, Microsoft's profits rose 11.4% last year and their EPS grew approximately 18%. I would be surprised if their is an insider successor who could easily replace Ballmer. An outside CEO wouldn't be cheap, and would be difficult to adapt and understand Microsoft's culture.
As much as I dislike Microsoft ... the current leadership, the current Board of Directors seem pretty solid, and seem to keep their shareholders happy.
m$ft or msft is a nice short form for msft you anal picking retard.
that and you did understand it. so stfu.
"MSFT" is a fairly commonly used abbreviation for Microsoft in technical conversation now. Shortening "Yahoo" to "YHOO" saves a letter. "Google" to "GOOG" saves you two letters at the expense of goofiness. Changing "Microsoft" to "MSFT" drops over half the letters, is widely understood, and goes well with the trend of abbreviating that company's name and products. For example, almost no one writes "Microsoft Internet Explorer" instead of "MSIE", but everyone spells out "Firefox" and "Safari".
This isn't a conspiracy or sign of a hidden agenda. It's just an abbreviation - and a widely used, clear one at that.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Personally, I'm glad Microsoft didn't end up buying Yahoo. I hope that threat is over for good...
I need to deal with Yahoo on occasion since I use them from web hosting, the last thing I want is to be forced to deal with Microsoft.
Smitty_each_one strays far off the topic of M$'s embarrassing failure to acquire Yahoo to say:
Which is ill informed. GNU/Linux distributions have been using post script as the basis for printing for a long time. This is the same basis every other professional printing house uses, so you should get world class printing from free software. There's are ample software to back that up on the user side from Latex to Open Office and lots of stuff in between. Open Office copies the functionality of Word to a fault. More reasonable word processors like Kword and Lyx are also available. There's also a wealth of graphic design software for things like posters and newspapers - inkscape and scribus spring to mind. For writing papers, books and technical journals there's still no beating Latex. You can find a template for just about anything and there are all sorts of easy to use editors, Lyx, Kile, Emacs and so on and so forth.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
interesting comments..I was wondering what you guys think of Communigate Pro vs zimbra??
"The general consensus on the street seemed to be that Microsoft was offering *too much* money... which is why Microsoft stock dropped when the offer was first announced..."
If it was such a good idea, shouldn't the stock have gone up, before Yahoo rejected it. The decision as what was *too much* or too little was for the officers of Yahoo to make and not some consensus. Do you have citations for such a consensus.
Similarly, another plausable explanation for the MS stock dropping was it was Microsoft admiting that Live Search was going nowhere in their war with Google Search. Now that the Yahoo bid is defunct, will the MS stock go up?
davecb5620@gmail.com
What killed the deal was Sweatys hardball tactics. I guess they're too used to 'making on offer they can't refuse' .. IMHO ...
davecb5620@gmail.com
.. is that Microsoft and Yahoo should both spontaneously combust, or otherwise cease to exist in some spectacular fashion.
Microsoft is a convicted monopolist, that has stifled more good tech than any other entity I can think of, and the only 'innovation' they do is on new ways to lock people in as customers.
Yahoo is a spammer and spammer supporter. Their main page is a cluttered ugly mess of crap. Yahoo 'stores' is horridly designed and hard to use.
Microsoft: No thanks, I'll stick with Free Software (Free as in GNU: fsf.org)
Yahoo: For search, no thanks, I'll stick with Google. For whatever else you offer, I'm probably not interested anyway.
What Yahoo should do next is partner with a content owner and start delivering rich content to the consumers. Yea I know, Time-Warner-AOL tried something similar, but maybe this time Yahoo will actually know what they are doing.
Of course no one is going to make real money out of delivering content to the Desktop unless their name begins with M. What Yahoo need to do is own the entire stack. From the technology running the servers, the content and the devices running on end users desktops. A MultiMedia device similar to the TiVO.
davecb5620@gmail.com
"I think the deal was sincere"
.. never anticipated Jerry Yang really being able to get so much of the board to think it was a bad idea"
.. With their new "Live!" stuff being integrated into Windows and Office, they finally have a decently compelling online product to try and spin off of"
.. :)
Well, yea, MS was genuinely trying to eat Yahoo whole.
"I suspect they
Going behind the board and talking directly to the stockholders wasn't going to create much love in Sunnyvale.
"Without an alternate reality time machine, we'll never know if it was really bad or good."
As a Google killer, I don't think so. As with so much else that Microsoft buys-in, I suspect it was the Yahoo staff that they were really after.
"MS
Well, it worked with Iexplorer, why not with Live Search. I wonder if removing integrated Live will break something, or even if it is possible.
"don't have anywhere to spin people *to*, in a way that would keep them in an all-MS ecosystem. Yahoo could give them all that in one deal"
Have you been getting a peek at Steves notes
davecb5620@gmail.com
It's a story about a financial takeover.
It's appropriate to refer to the companies by their stock symbols, because anyone interested in how the game is being played out is going to be looking at charts that show the prices of the stocks as of the dates in question.
The most commonly asked question I get about any financial story is "Dude, what's the symbol for that company again?" Referring to companies by their ticker symbols is a convenient time-saver, because there are thousands of companies out there, it's almost impossible to remember the tickers for all of them, and because most of the time when you read a story about a company, you don't even care what the company does, only how you can make money out of it. The ticker symbol is the starting point to understanding what the companies do, which is the first step in understanding what they're probably worth, and hopefully (if your guess is better than the other guy's guess), how to make money off it.
"Yahoo because they effectively loaded themselves with a poison pill to keep Microsoft from taking them over"
...
What poison pill, Yahoo asked for more money, like good executive officers should do. Yahoo wanted $37 and Ballmer wanted $33 a share
"It is bad news for Yahoo employees and shareholders though."
"Shares of Yahoo closed Friday at $28.67, almost 50 percent higher than their pre-bid price"
davecb5620@gmail.com
Well, Microsoft thinks Yahoo is worth something, $47.5 billion to be precise. What an endorsement ...
davecb5620@gmail.com
Nothing personal, but just because you had to look up "MSFT" and discover it was a stock ticker symbol for Microsoft, doesn't mean that the rest of us nerds had to look it up too.
My comments here are my own; I do not speak for my employer.
Microsoft business model is quite old now, web 2.0 , social networks, Software as Service and connected world has no place for such old business model.cause Microsoft is created for not connected world and need so much change to become ready for today. Actually Microsoft management understand that the paradigm changes and they looking for off the shelf and strong enough alchemy to convert Microsoft from old beast to young beauty and present it to connected world.they got it fare enough on time,but the problem is yahoo also know his value. we have to wait and see the changes in Microsoft to become a connected world delight (if can) or meet the dead end. obviously Microsoft is company with most intelligent and talented peoples of present they can make a lot of changes.
MS is even shorter, you dumbfuck. And using the dollar sign for S... people still do that?
Well, you need help from your mom in order to not make so stupid looking mistakes.
This is a nerd forum, and you sound like you belong to digg.
Wall Street analysts understand business but generally do not understand long-term technology trends. That is because they are not paid to. They are paid to make predictions with, at most a 1 to 2 year horizon. Most spend their time looking no more than 1 to 2 quarters ahead. Given a choice between a small gain now vs. a large potential gain later, they will take the short, small win every time.
The grandparent post has it right--Yahoo has a huge footprint, loyal customers, and a continuously decreasing cost-to-capability ratio. I would not bet against them. They may not overtake Google as #1, but there is no reason they cannot be very, very profitable as #2. It's not a race, it's business, and you don't have to be the biggest to be very successful.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I think Ballmer's bid for Yahoo! was little more than a high stakes game of chicken at best and at worst it was tantamount to corporate terrorism. He really does make me sick.
Very Intriguing and Sudden Turnaround After
Very Idiotic Sounding Threats and Attacks (after)
"Vitriolic Infringement (of) Software-Patents" Threats and Allegations.
Total BillShut!
Hackers have long memories. It works both ways.
mods, please ... +5 informative
Hackers have long memories. It works both ways.
Actually,if you were to look at my posting history you would see that it was a response to twitter and his sock puppet army posting "M$" everywhere. And while they are plenty of people who wouldn't know what I was talking about if I simply put MS,anyone can put MSFT into Google and know I was talking about Microsoft Corporation. It is simply a way to have a conversation about Microsoft without having to type Microsoft over and over but without the kiddy "LOL M$ SUXOR" crap. So while I do apologize if this bothers you so greatly I'm afraid I'll have to stick with MSFT as it gets my message across without all the juvenile crap. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Yahoo's stock has ranged hugely in value over the past year, despite its outlook not changing a lot, so I'd say the market has difficulty figuring out what Yahoo actually is worth, and changes its mind with the winds.
Now if Microsoft had offered a large premium that was completely above the range of variation, I could see your argument that it would be by far the best offer stockholders could expect. But they didn't---the stock's 52-week range is $18.50 to $34.00, and Microsoft offered around $30, which is solidly inside the pre-offer range, albeit at the upper end.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
On the announcement of the offer, the stock price went up to fairly close to the offer value. Anyone who wanted to cash out should have done so.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I wish that MS had bought Yahoo for the simple reason that Yahoo's way past their sell-by date and digesting them would have given Microsoft a good case of food poisoning. Yahoo's content is now at sub-USA Today levels of dumbing down, their mail client is a joke and hardly anyone uses them for search anymore. So what's there to buy? More than anything it looked like a replay of the Time Warner/AOL merger. Too bad Microsoft didn't take the poisoned bait. Now we'll have to wait for another massive tactical blunder.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
Do you have any idea what QuarkXPress or Pagemaker do? It is far, far more than any hodgepodge of word processors and drawing tools can handle, regardless of license. It's a step above coding PostScript by hand, but there isn't a real FOSS desktop publishing app that can hold a candle to the apps that pros rely on every day.
and it won't be over until Micro$oft 0wns Yahoo.
If the OffalXML thing has shown us anything, it's that what the Empire wants, the Empire gets. And the Empire wants to kill Google.
The most straightforward way to do that is to team up with a viable competitor, then cut off the victim's air supply.
Look forward to M$ acquiring Yahoo (even if they have to steal it), then breaking Google, and keeping it broken. (Weekly "security" updates, anyone?) (Read that Imperial EULA lately?)
The courts might object to such heavy-handedness, but that will take five years, by which time Google will exist only in the memories of reactionary geeks.
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
I would be happy if there was something even remotely similar to the Adobe design/publishing stack on Linux, but the reality is there just isn't. Mentioning LaTex and Emacs (WTF) on the same paragraph as your claim of desktop publishing superiority is laughable at best.
Next time, just use one of your other eight accounts so people think you just got here and have no idea what you're talking about. They might be more lenient with the mod points.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
Very Intriguing and Sudden Turnaround AfterVery Idiotic Sounding Threats and Attacks (after)"Vitriolic Infringement (of) Software-Patents" Threats and Allegations.Total BillShut!
College-Pages.com - Online Colleges, Degrees, and Programs
I still prefer calling them Micros~1.
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
When I read Steve Ballmer's letter, it looks to me like a:
"Reasons why Mr. Jerry Yang should be fired" letter to the board/shareholders.
Am I the only one?
Jerry
That's fine for financial places, the appropriate slashdot abbreviation is M$ (not confused with MS the wasting disease) So will people stop bellyaching about it and just use the M$ correctly. For a while on OSnews they actually replaced any instance of M$ with "Microsoft" because they got tired of looking at it!
Thank you.
Aaaaaand here's the proof: Yahoo down 20%, Microsoft up nearly 6%.
You're using opening figures? Come on.
I'm interested in what happens after the people who just read financial press reports and believe them, stop buying...
and the final result - MSFT down on the day (very slightly). I already agreed YHOO would be down.
Basically though, I'd declare it a draw on MSFT as that's not much movement either way.
Microsoft had a multitude of options, they made the one that made the most business sense at the time. If shares of Yahoo continue to decline or can't get back up, who knows, the hostile takeover might start itself without Microsofts' help.
That's possible of course, still not sure how likely I think that is. Not going near either stock for a while.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So cuntard, did you check the Yahoo stock price today? Yes? I thought so. But hey, you're more intelligent than everyone on earth, so you must know what's happening.